Illuminated keyboard on ASUS U50VG laptop, backlight or led ?

[Alan Jenkins]

On 8/1/09, Danny Kukawka <danny.kukawka at web.de> wrote:
> On Samstag, 1. August 2009, Alan Jenkins wrote:
>> 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

Thanks!  It's not my hardware, but I think I see an issue:

Don't you also need to set "keyboard_backlight.num_levels"?  According
to Documentation/leds-class.txt, valid led values are 0-255, so I
expect num_levels should be set to 256.

Yuck... I think the backlight interface is better in that it exports
the available granularity.  But I guess all one really wants is "on"
and "off", with finer adjustment being either automatic (light sensor)
or buried as a config option.

I assume info.capabilities=["keyboard_backlight"] gets set
automatically on the KeyboardBacklight interface.

Alan