Illuminated keyboard on ASUS U50VG laptop, backlight or led ?

[Danny Kukawka]

On Samstag, 1. August 2009, Alan Jenkins wrote:
> On 8/1/09, Corentin Chary <corentin.chary at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> >
> > It seems there is also a KeyboardBacklight interface which is what we
> > want, but I didn't find how to use it
> > without an addon (like addon-macbookpro-backlight).
>
> But if you look at the methods, they are exactly the same, right? 

Yes, they are.

> I 
> think the idea is to use an FDI file to match our LED device (or
> possibly create it as a hal device... I'm still really fuzzy on hal),
> and then mark it as having the "keyboard_backlight" capability.

No, it wouldn't work this way. At least not with the current key.

I changed the led addon in my repo to check if a led has 
leds.function=kbd_backlight and provide then the 
org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.KeyboardBacklight interface instead of
org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Leds. Please check if this helps.

see: 
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~dkukawka/hal/commit/?id=c900d0e5012b1dd0e0fa6e20fd0d92a59b3de093

[...]
> > I believe that we need a keyboard backlight addon that respond to
> > KEY_KBDILLUM*
> > and update the corresponding /sys/class/vendor:color:kbd_backlight.
>
> Oops, thats not the addons job.  It's for something like the gnome
> power manager.  It looks like g-p-m already picks up the device with a
> "keyboard_backlight" capability, and react to keyboard brightness key
> events.

Correct. It's not the job of the addon to react on keyevents. This is up to a 
desktop application which listen to the events and call then the interface. 
The same way it work for e.g. the brightness of your laptop panel.

Danny