Comment 69 for bug 415023

Once again, you do not need to press a key, if you adjust the brightness in software the hardware emits a keypress.

The main issue is that brightness adjustments need to be either handled in hardware or in software, i.e. by g-p-m, powerdevil etc, and that right now it is handled by both. This is broken in 9.04 as well, using the keys you effectively get only 4 brightness levels although it is capable of 8, there is just no flickering, which seems to be caused by a rounding bug when using kernel modesetting.

The solution as I see it is that either MSI updates their BIOS or g-p-m and friends do not attempt to handle it. I don't know the equivalent of setting laptop_panel.brightness_in_hardware to true in HAL when using xrandr. I have asked on the gpm list but really don't have time to investigate any more into this.