Keyboard Backlight on Samsung NP740U3E

[mp42]

Hi everyone,

Has anybody installed Ubuntu 13.04 on the Samsung NP740U3E and managed to find a way to get the keyboard backlight working? I installed the Samsung-tools package but that doesn't seem to have any effect. Oddly enough, on occasions when I plugin the charger the backlight lights up for a while. I looked around and most suggestions seem to be modifying the brightness under /sys/class/leds/samsung\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness but all I have is /sys/class/leds/phy0-led.

Everything else (except the Elan touchpad and SD card reader as discussed in another thread) seem to work.

Thanks!

[neboglory]

Do you have the CONFIG_SAMSUNG_LAPTOP kernel option enabled? I believe that this kernel option is required for full functionality out of the samsung-tools package, at least it was on my 740.

You need to make sure that you have installed linux without uefi, as due to the current bricking potential of samsung laptops running uefi, the samsung-laptop module is blacklisted if uefi is detected.

On Ubuntu, I believe you can check your kernel config for this option with:

Code: Select all

cat /boot/config-$(uname -r) | grep CONFIG_SAMSUNG_LAPTOP

Personally, my 740 is running gentoo ~amd64. I had a heck of a time navigating the google for good information on this model - it is just way too new.

[mp42]

Do you have the CONFIG_SAMSUNG_LAPTOP kernel option enabled? I believe that this kernel option is required for full functionality out of the samsung-tools package, at least it was on my 740.

You need to make sure that you have installed linux without uefi, as due to the current bricking potential of samsung laptops running uefi, the samsung-laptop module is blacklisted if uefi is detected.

On Ubuntu, I believe you can check your kernel config for this option with:

Code: Select all

cat /boot/config-$(uname -r) | grep CONFIG_SAMSUNG_LAPTOP

Personally, my 740 is running gentoo ~amd64. I had a heck of a time navigating the google for good information on this model - it is just way too new.

Yeah I actually installed it with uefi. In any case, I just realized that the adaptive brightness still works so the keyboard backlight turns on when I'm in the dark. I guess that's fine with me

[neboglory]

Yeah I actually installed it with uefi. In any case, I just realized that the adaptive brightness still works so the keyboard backlight turns on when I'm in the dark. I guess that's fine with me

Just a warning, I have yet to hear anything definitive about the bricking potential of uefi samsung laptops. I definitely would not enable any thing that writes or dumps to nvram if I were you.

It seems like adaptive brightness settings in bios does squat though. Mine is disabled and I have to still wage a a small war to adjust by screen or keyboard backlight. I have also noticed that the fn hotkeys like to stick/repeat and then other times stop working. showkey and xev have confirmed this behavior. I on a 3.9.3 custom kernel though, not too sure about its stability. Have you noticed any odd behavior with the combination fn hotkeys?