28 November 2011
Just in case this can help anyone on the fedora planet or other, who doesn’t visit fedoraforum.org or ask.fedoraproject.org very often. Admittedly I don’t visit there very often myself. A quick search in bugzilla shows some possibly related bugs.
If you don’t seem to be able to alter the screen brightness in fedora, either with the Fn keys, or through the gnome-control-center, try reinstalling bash. I rarely have the screen brightness on full on my laptop, so when I couldn’t change it on f16, it was ever so slightly annoying! I honestly wouldn’t know what to file a bug report against, so I started searching. First stop was that shiny new ask.fedoraproject.org instance, which led me to this post on forums.fedoraforum.org
So with the Fn keys not working, which had always worked previously; and the slider in the screen settings in gnome-control-center having no effect, doing a simple sudo yum reinstall bash was the answer.
Update: It’s listed in the ‘Common F16 Bugs’ here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F16_bugs#Bash_entry_in_.2Fetc.2Fshells_disappears_after_update