Very dark screen in 'normal' mode
 

I've bought an Asus Eeeee netbook because I heard they are good with Linux. I'm very much a new Linux arrival after a long time with Windows.
I've installed Ubuntu on the machine.
If it boots 'normally' the screen emulates a dark tunnel. If I boot from 'recovery mode', then choose 'resume normal mode' (followed by 'exit recovery mode'), the screen is brightness itself. It is, I suppose, 'normal' and how I want it to be.
So - presumably - some setting is not how it should be.

By the by, I have tried to answer the brightness - or lack of brightness - from settings when in the dark screen mode, but that hasn't corrected it.

Help, please,experts!
Cheers, paul

So when you start in recovery mode the brightness is okay for you?
And with "answer the brightness" you probably mean you set it in the Ubuntu settings.

You should check the brightness settings with xbacklight or xrandr --verbose
There are also settings somewhere in /sys
sudo find /sys -iname "*bright*" -or -iname "*light*"
And then something like
cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness

Also do this while in recovery to compare.

If nothing helps try to reinstall Ubuntu or another distribution ...

Thanks very much, Axl. Actually I didn't set the brightness. I installed ubuntu on my PC at the same time. Everything works fine on the PC, but the netbook has this odd quirk.

So, yes, start opening in recovery mode, and choose to end the recovery mode in the next two windows, and the brightness is as desired. But start in the normal mode, and you need a torch to find your way around. It's like this on the netbook, but works perfectly normally on the PC.

Good to hear. But still the systems are different and additionally some things can go wrong.
In recovery many services and I guess also drivers and modules are not loaded. So maybe it's something to do with your graphic driver. If you can't see anything in normal mode you could still boot once into it and fetch some logs from recovery mode. Especially /var/log/Xorg* (should be three) could be interesting. They are long. So if you have them post them with your favorite nopaste service. Or pack them and upload them somewhere.

Btw which Ubuntu version is this?

Are you doing the test when the netbook is running off its internal battery? Does the brightness go up when you plug your netbook into its charger? If so, it could be some power saving setting related to on_battery/off_battery.