With BIOS and MICOM version 04CA, the brightness was not working on my Samsung NC 10 as well, a BIOS update indeed fixed the problem. That said, even without the BIOS update, the backlight (and modesetting) worked using nc10-backlight from this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~voria/+archive/ppa
So, it is principally fixable for old BIOSes as well.
With BIOS and MICOM version 04CA, the brightness was not working on my Samsung NC 10 as well, a BIOS update indeed fixed the problem. That said, even without the BIOS update, the backlight (and modesetting) worked using nc10-backlight from this PPA: https:/ /launchpad. net/~voria/ +archive/ ppa
So, it is principally fixable for old BIOSes as well.