I've been running Kubuntu 10 and Mint 11 on my laptops (an Asus Eee 900 and an HP G72), and it mostly works (save the battery monitor, suspend/resume, fn keys and the usual annoyances). With some distros I have no backlight during the installation, but it works after that. But not with the latest distros, like OpenSUSE, Mint 12, Kubuntu etc. I guess they've got a newer kernel and that something is changed there for some reason. I get no backlight at all on any of the laptops, and I'm dying to check out Mint with Cinnamon. Is there anything I can do?

Have you tried to add acpi_osi=Linux as a kernel parameter and use fn keys to change brightness?
You probably have Intel's integrated graphics, wright?

Don't know about the HP.

http://community.linuxmint.com/hardware/view/3933

http://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/eee-applet

http://musante.i.ph/blogs/musante/20...lation-issues/

I can't really help you as I run AntiX 11 on mine. My mic fix also.

I'd love to try that if I knew how. I can press TAB or something in the grub menu, do I just type "acpi_osi" there?
I think it's Intel graphics on both PCs.

Start your system and wait for the GRUB menu to show. Now highlight the kernel you want to use, and press the 'c' key. You should be able to see and edit the commands associated with the highlighted kernel. Go down to the line starting with linux and add your parameter acpi_osi=Linux to its end. Now press Ctrl + x to boot. When your screen goes black again press fn keys for changing the brightness (try both of them, increasing and decreasing brightness, multiple times). If that worked this is how you permanently add that parameter to the kernel so you don't need to go trough the same procedure every time you boot:
Go to terminal and run this:
Find the line starting with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and append acpi_osi=Linux to its end. For example:
To save the file press 'Ctrl+X' and then 'y'. Now, in order to changes take effect you need to update grub:
That is it. Enjoy it!
Good luck.

Trying it on the HP G72.
Pressing 'c' gave me a command line, pressing 'e' brought up a list of commands, I assume that's what you meant. Anyway, the parameter you suggested didn't make a difference. But I found another suggestion (http://blogs.pcworld.co.nz/pcworld/t...ing_the_b.html) and I added "acpi_backlight=vendor" at the end as well, and that worked

The fn keys still don't work but I can adjust brightness and volume manually.

I'll try the same fix on the Eee, with a live USB stick. Fn keys work there in Mint 11, I guess they'll work in Mint 12 too. I think Asus in general plays better with Linux than HP.