I have a cube that emits light and another one that shall receive light. If I render the scene (F12) with a freshly created “receive cube” it’s lit fine. Unfortunately as soon as I create a new material and assign it to the “receive cube” it doesn’t show up at all in the render scene.
As far as I can see all layers and scenes are enabled for rendering. Any ideas?
I use blender 2.71 on Ubuntu 14.04
Too little information supplied.
Please always supply a demo blend file with support questions.
Of course. That wasn’t too clever. I prepared a more simple project as example. When you render it now it has no light on the bottom black cube. Remove its material and it is lit after rendering.
lightexample.blend (505 KB)
The version suggests you installed Blender from a repository. Download, unpack and run the official. Repository versions have many problems which don’t appear in the official.
I upgraded to 2.75a but the problem persists.
Added a default material to the large cube in place of the black material and rendered
I don’t see any problems. What do you see ? What were you expecting to see ?
I was expecting to see exactly what your screenshot shows. Instead of that it looks like this:
Black was just randomly chosen by me. Any other colour doesn’t work either. What do you mean by adding a default material? Sorry that I don’t understand it but I am quite new to blender and try to work my way through. The tutorials I follow don’t say that there is something special about the material in this situation.
Case solved. When I give the material a brighter colour I can see the light 
No idea why it didn’t work with another colour in the first place.
