cannot get laptop panel brightness

[Rick Bilonick]

I have a Toshiba Satellite A15-S129 now running Fedora 8. In the recent
past (Fedora 7?), the laptop brightness was adjustable via a panel
applet. Now the applet says "cannot get laptop panel brightness". The
applet won't adjust the panel brightness (and neither will the function
keys). Any idea on how to get this working again? I checked SELinux
Troubleshooter but did not see anything related to this.

Rick B.