What a pain in the butt. If you own an MSI Wind Notebook, don't rush out there like me and upgrade to Karmic 9.10 without first thinking.

That's exactly what I did, and because I rushed the result was a completely unusable system. One where the monitor flickers endlessly like a maniac, the brightness trembling nervously like the system is about the explode any second.

Turns out that this is a known problem: brightness is broken on MSI WIND U100. I should have been more careful, checked possible problems in advance. So listen to me and be wary.

According to the bug description, there are all kinds of workarounds and possible fixes, e.g. disabling the gnome-power-manager, hitting the Fn+11 key or whatever. However, after spending a good portion of the morning trying them all, nothing works to my satisfaction.

Fortunately there's a relatively easy way to re-install Jaunty Jackalope 9.01 via the USB-stick, but first I needed to backup all of the important stuff under my /home/kiffin/* directory.

I use the Wind Notebook alot in the train, to read my email, to conduct remote maintenance, to do some last-minute programming or simply to surf the Internet aimlessly, so the idea is that I can get it all up and running before tomorrow.

Hopefully in the next update they'll have gotten this problem fixed. Before I jump the gun again and upgrade, I'll make sure to read the release notes and verify that this aggravating problem has been fixed.