This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 14 development cycle.
Changing version to '14'.

More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

Moving over to xorg-x11-drv-intel for further debugging.

I experience a similar problem on my Dell Studio 1558, which uses the built-in Arrandale GPU.

my smolt: http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_e95155fc-9a15-4da4-bbc2-4ca17c7dac50
(kernel listed is outdated though, I'm using the latest as of today.)

Jens, please report your bug separately, it is unlikely to have the same cause as Fabian's bug.

Reporter, do you still see this bug with current F13 (or F14 if you're now using that)? Can you post the contents of /sys/class/backlight ?

Yes, I am still having this issue on Fedora Rawhide. (not all the latest updates, as there is this glibc breakage)

There are no contents:
[fabiand@proprietary ~]$ ls /sys/class/backlight/
[fabiand@proprietary ~]$ 

[fabiand@proprietary ~]$ uname -a
Linux proprietary.local 2.6.36-0.32.rc6.git2.fc15.i686 #1 SMP Sun Oct 3 20:37:15 UTC 2010 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
[fabiand@proprietary ~]$ 


[fabiand@proprietary ~]$ rpm -qa "(kernel|gnome-power)*"
gnome-power-manager-2.31.91-1.fc14.i686
kernel-devel-2.6.36-0.28.rc6.git0.fc15.i686
kernel-2.6.36-0.28.rc6.git0.fc15.i686
kernel-2.6.36-0.30.rc6.git0.fc15.i686
kernel-devel-2.6.36-0.30.rc6.git0.fc15.i686
kernel-devel-2.6.36-0.32.rc6.git2.fc15.i686
kernel-headers-2.6.36-0.32.rc6.git2.fc15.i686
kernel-2.6.36-0.32.rc6.git2.fc15.i686

[fabiand@proprietary ~]$ dmesg | grep applesmc
[   22.070057] applesmc: Apple MacBook (v2) detected:
[   22.070064] applesmc:  - Model with accelerometer
[   22.070067] applesmc:  - Model without light sensors and backlight
[   22.070071] applesmc:  - Model with 10 temperature sensors
[   22.125726] applesmc: device successfully initialized (0xe0, 0x00).
[   22.125732] applesmc: device successfully initialized.
[   22.126623] applesmc: 1 fans found.
[   22.132446] input: applesmc as /devices/platform/applesmc.768/input/input11
[   22.136123] applesmc: driver successfully loaded.

But I am quite sure that it has a backlight ;) and a light sensor.

AIUI, this is more of a kernel issue than a graphics driver issue. mjg59 wrote a blog post about this stuff - http://mjg59.livejournal.com/127103.html - which obviously means he's the expert, so enjoy, Matt =)

dupe of #539961 ?

also might be a dupe of bug 641978

Fixed for me (for some months).