Illuminated keyboard on ASUS U50VG laptop, backlight or led ?

[Alan Jenkins]

On 8/1/09, Alan Jenkins <sourcejedi.lkml at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.
^
Sorry, to avoid confusion I was moaning about the _kernel_ backlight
interface.  Apologies for being obscure.

Thanks again
Alan