the problem is still a bit elusive. The things you see on Jaunty sound like the laptop is not responding to the wmi-calls. I think you said this works on a vanilla 2.6.27 version. Does this also work on a vanilla 2.6.28 or .30? In any case I would be interested if you could check the acer-wmi brightnss interface there and tell me whether you can change brightness by echoing values into there or not.
@gidantribal,
the problem is still a bit elusive. The things you see on Jaunty sound like the laptop is not responding to the wmi-calls. I think you said this works on a vanilla 2.6.27 version. Does this also work on a vanilla 2.6.28 or .30? In any case I would be interested if you could check the acer-wmi brightnss interface there and tell me whether you can change brightness by echoing values into there or not.