Asus Zenbook UX31A Backlit Keyboard Controls KDE

Greetings,

I have am running openSuse 12.3 with the latest KDE from factory and the stock 3.7 kernel. I have the screen brightness up/down keyboard controls working by putting acpi_osi="!Windows 2012" in the Grub parameters, but the keyboard backlight controls don’t work. I have set the keyboard layout to Asus laptop and the key bindings are set to the keyboard backlight up/down buttons but pressing them yields no results. The keyboard backlight buttons work in Gnome so it is possible to have them function properly.

Anyone know how to fix this? I’ve read through many tutorials and bug reports frompeople with similar issues, but nothing recent and most of it deals with work arounds on Arch from several kernel releases ago.

Thanks for the help.

UPDATE: As of the latest round of KDE updates from the KDE Factory keyboard brightness is adjustable via the power widget in the system tray. The buttons still do nothing, but I suspect that is something that can be easily fixed or will be corrected in a future update.

You can set default brightness levels for the keyboard just like you can for the screen brightness. 4.11 is looking to be an excellent release.

UPDATE: Brightness controls for the keyboard had been working with the KDE-Factory repo. This included controlling keyboard brightness via the hot keys as well as the power widget. However, after doing the update to the final of KDE 4.11 has completely removed the ability to control keyboard brightness. The hot keys don’t function and there is no longer a slider to control brightness in the power widget on the taskbar.

Has anyone else experienced this regression?

KDE Factory is in flux so what was working before may not work today. Please submit a bug report so that your Asus will work effortlessly by the time the final release is available in openSUSE 13.1

Before doing anything else, create a new user, login on a KDE session as this new user, and see if the problem exists for that new user. If not, the origin of the issue is in your homedir, if it is, report a bug.

I created a test user account. No go. The new account didn’t have the keyboard controls in the new account either. However, through doing this I discovered that if I logged in to either my account or the test account, logged out and then logged back in the keyboard backlight controls began working and they brightness slider appeared in the taskbar power widget. On this first login none of this occurred, to the point that the keyboard backlight settings were missing from the power management options in Settings. Second login it was all back.

Hi,

I’am using Opensuse 13.1 with KDE 4.11. There is a strange way to activate the backlight control:

  • log out (do no restart!)
  • log in again
  • now you find the backlight control in powermanagement widget and you can use also the FN +F4/F5 buttons.

Michael

Wow. It was working fine for the longest time and now it is back to having the backlight controls missing. This makes it work. Not ideal from a KDE standpoint, but a nice workaround.

Now that openSUSE has been advertising openSUSE Factory as a rolling release you can add the Factory repos to zypper or Yast.
Personally, I would make a clean install of " / and/or /home " using the DVD or Live CD (to USB) upgrade using imagewrite
If you haven’t installed “imagewrite” use zypper as shown below:

# zypper in imagewrite

As of Sept. 18, 2014 we have openSUSE Beta 1 for download. It uses the latest stable kernel and Factory KDE 4.14x.

For openSUSE 13.1 I have added the KDE Current repositories for updating to KDE 4.14.1.

Here are the links to be added to zypper ( zypper dup ) or Yast:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Current/openSUSE_13.1/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra/KDE_Current_openSUSE_13.1/

An updated link provides the latest status on openSUSE 13.2 https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Roadmap

Date
2014-9-18 13.2 Beta
2014-10-09 13.2 RC1
2014-10-30 13.2 GM in-house release
2014-11-04: 13.2 Final Release

Note: The latest update to Bash should be included by the time openSUSE 13.2 RC1 and Final release are provided for download or update.