How to turn on the keyboard backlight on a laptop?

Support
1

hello
is there a simple common way to turn on the rgb lights on my laptop’s keyboard?
when pressing caps lock the light of this specific key turns on,but that’s about it.

i looked around a bit and under asus::kbd_backlight,everything related to brightness is at number 3.
i have no Fn key to turn it on/off and the Fn key related to it’s brightness level doesn’t do anything.(in the kde/power icon,it’s at 100%)

i saw there is this command; xset led on or xset led 3
is this command available in manjaro?

also these commands:
sudo echo 3 > /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness
or
echo 3 | sudo tee /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness
but i haven’t tried those yet .

is there maybe a simple on/off toggle in KDE?

it’s definitely not critical,just a nice option to have.

2

This is for caps lock, num lock, etc. leds.

You could try this. If it doesn’t work, post the output of head -n999 "/sys/class/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/*".

What is at 100%?

There probably is one.

1 Like
3

doesn’t this command:
echo 3 | sudo tee /sys/class/leds/asus\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness
supposed to write 3 in this file?
it’s already 3.
(sorry,i like to understand the commands i run)

in the panel there is a power/battery icon;clicking on it shows “keyboard brightness” 100%.

since the caps lock light works and it’s brightness is fine,it seems it works,just doesn’t apply to the rest of the keys.

4

Yes, it writes the file. You can see the maximum brightness in /sys/class/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/max_brightness, you should be able to write values between 0 and the maximum into /sys/class/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness, and that should, in theory, change the brightness of the keyboard. E.g. if the maximum brightness is 50, you could try

echo 25 | sudo tee "/sys/class/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness"

and that should set the brightness to around half of the maximum.

And I gather there is no slider (or something) next to it, or that slider doesn’t actually change the brightness?

I’m not familiar with your particular machine, but usually, caps lock, num lock, etc. LEDs are handled separately from keyboard backlight.

1 Like
5

Thank you

-both max brightness and brightness already have 3 written within them,
so i suppose there isn’t much i can do.

-there is a slider buth it’s allready at max and moving it doesn’t do anything.

i also tried changing the keyboard from Generic 86… to “asus laptop” but it didn’t help either.

6

If you try writing 0, 1, 2 to brightness, does that change anything?

7

no.
was i supposed to reload something after each change i tried?
(i edited with nano)

Edit:
imo it depends on the firmware;
I’m almost certain that if i had the lights enabled before removing windows,it would have persist to the linux installation.
unfortunately i saw no setting in it regarding the backlight.

i saw all kind of suggestions online regarding Grub and the kernel settings,
but that’s how far I’m willing to go for this minim matter until there’s some simple fix.

8

i have the same problem i cannot turn on my keyboard lights

9

i don’t know the answer and what laptop do you have,but this guy seems to have managed to make it work for his Asus Tuf:

personally i would not install thisprogram just for the backlight “issue”.

10

I solved my issue just by going to the bios and turn on the lights in it, but it stays permanently on, you cannot turn off.

11