I have a beautiful Alienware m18x laptop, the most important feature of which, besides the 500gb ssd, is the LED backlit keyboard. I love this keyboard. The lights can be set to specific colors! In sections! You have no idea how much I love this keyboard.
The problem is that I have GNU/Linuxified this laptop. The proprietary manufacturer program for changing the LEDs only works on Windows. It's hard to find nice GNU/Linux programs for changing the lights that weren't built specifically for a Debian distribution. I am running Fedora, not a Debian distro. Fortunately, nice and really smart Germans have noticed that the backlit keyboard is a usb device and reverse engineered all the operating codes that Alienware won't just release. Other nice people have provided some example C code free for download that is easily alterable. The only problem now is that the it's an 8-bit color system, which I so don't know the codes for, but Wikipedia has the color chart for that.
Someone told me if I put GNU/Linux on this machine I would spend half my life trying to get the lights changed. It really only took a few days of reading the internet and sporadic work, attempting the manufacturer program through WINE and a VM, trying to get alienfxlite.jar to work, discovering that the pyalienfx package won't work because libusb on Fedora is different from the one on Ubuntu, and by the way unless you download libusb-devel you won't get the necessary header files.
So if anyone else is wondering if the lights on an Alienware will still work under GNU/Linux, the answer is yes, but you have to use C to write directly to the USB device.
No comments:
Post a Comment