I made a fairly simple statusbar applet for doing the brightness changes on the modified kernel... You can try it out here:
http://cs.trinity.edu/~acm/debs/adva...klight-0.2.tar
Remember: ONLY USE THIS WITH THE MODIFIED KERNEL! I have heard of it blanking screens on the normal kernel.
To use it, you will need to untar it and then login as root and run the install script. It puts the files in the right places and changes a few permissions that are necessary. You *may* need to open the control panel -> Panels configuration and enable it, or it may just open itself automatically... YMMV.

I'd love to hear some feedback on this... There are a few known issues, however:
Until you first set the brightness with the applet, it does not know the correct current brightness for display purposes (not a big deal, really... just annoying for me). Also, it is not a nice little popdown box like the real brightness applet, it opens a whole new window. If someone knows how to get a HildonControlbar to work inside a GtkMenu, PLEASE tell me. Also, it *will* allow n800 users to set 0 brightness, which will blank the screen, so if you don't know what you are doing, be careful. I will probably be fixing that soon, however.

I'm very fuzzy on exactly what this is even doing, as I just copied the math operations from the blset script, but if someone feels like explaining how I could set the brightness with the dsmetest thing, then I could try to impliment that. I should have the source up in a bit, I'm just going to clean it up first (it's my first GTK app, and it's kind of embarassing at the moment >_>).