[SOLVED] ASUS N56V Keyboard backlight not working

joe_2000 · 12-16-2012, 12:23 PM

Hi. I would be grateful for some help here.
I recently installed Linux Aptosid on my Asus N56V Laptop, and I can't get the keyboard backlight to work.
The function keys produce no output in xev, and the files that are supposed to contain the brightness levels are not present on my system.

This is my kernel version:
3.7-0.slh.2-aptosid-amd64

I tried the procedure described here, but no luck:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/16626...n-an-asus-n56v
The installation went smoothly - no complaints, but it did help at all.

Somehow the file /sys/class/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness is not present in my case. I only have a directory called ath9k-phy0 in /sys/class/leds/

I also tried this advice but it did not help either:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hp-g72-936737/

The funniest thing is that I have it working properly on archbang, which is installed on another partition of the same laptop.

Can anyone help?

In case it's relevant:

lcpci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 04)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev c4)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev c4)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev c4)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation HM76 Express Chipset LPC Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 04)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 630M] (rev a1)
03:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR8161 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 08)

joe_2000 · 12-17-2012, 12:00 PM

Ok. Now I am confused. I just tried it from the aptosid live medium.

Only ran (as root)

Code:

apt-get update
dpkg -i /path/to/file/asus-wmi-dkms_0.2_all.deb

Got a complaint that dkms was missing, so:

Code:

apt-get install dkms
dpkg -i /path/to/file/asus-wmi-dkms_0.2_all.deb

and magically the needed files in /sys/class/led appeared!

Code:

root@aptosid:/sys/class/leds# ls
asus::kbd_backlight  ath9k-phy0

I also ran a dist-upgrade to find out if that would break the functionality again, but it didn't.

So this leaves me wondering what I might have broken on my system to stop this from working.
Any ideas how I could diagnose this?

joe_2000 · 12-17-2012, 12:30 PM

Strange. I somehow got it to work now. Uninstalled the asus-wmi-dkms module and reinstalled it.
Not the first time I tried this, but this time before doing this I booted into the previous kernel:

Code:

uname -r
3.6-8.slh.3-aptosid-amd64

Could that be the reason? I will run another check with the live distro I think where I first dist-upgrade and then install the asus-wmi-dkms module to see if it fails to install properly.

joe_2000 · 05-07-2013, 02:13 PM

So yesterday I did a dist-upgrade on my aptosid install which installed kernel 3.9. Unfortunately this broke the keyboard backlight again.

I managed to fix it and I thought I'd share how:

Booting into 3.8 kernel helped, the keyboard backlight worked again. So I decided to give it a fresh start and manually removed the asus-wmi-dkms_0.2_all.deb (with the original intent to reinstall it)

Code:

dpkg --purge asus-wmi-dkms

To my surprise, keyboard backlight was still working under kernel 3.8. Dmesg after reboot said:

Code:

root@ASUS-N56V:$ dmesg  | grep asus
[    7.040849] asus_wmi: ASUS WMI generic driver loaded
[    7.065513] asus_wmi: Initialization: 0x1asus_wmi: BIOS WMI version: 7.9
[    7.065577] asus_wmi: SFUN value: 0x6a0877<6>[    7.066131] input: Asus WMI hotkeys as /devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi/input/input6
[    7.123894] asus_wmi: Disabling ACPI video driver

I rebooted into kernel 3.9. Keyboard backlight still not working. Dmesg said:

Code:

[    9.029886] asus_wmi: ASUS WMI generic driver loaded
[    9.464782] asus_wmi: Initialization: 0x1asus_wmi: BIOS WMI version: 7.9
[    9.464825] asus_wmi: SFUN value: 0x6a0877<6>[    9.465385] input: Asus WMI hotkeys as /devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi/input/input7
[    9.526591] asus-nb-wmi: probe of asus-nb-wmi failed with error -5

So I did

Code:

modprobe asus-nb-wmi

and tadaa, keyboard backlight working again.
All there was left to do to make the fix permanent was adding asus-nb-wmi to /etc/modules. Rebooted ... still working. Let's see how long it lasts :-)
Hope this is helpful to some others...

jgezau · 05-25-2013, 02:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by joe_2000

All there was left to do to make the fix permanent was adding asus-nb-wmi to /etc/modules. Rebooted ... still working. Let's see how long it lasts :-)
Hope this is helpful to some others...

so you mean to make a file

Code:

asus-nb-wmi.conf

in /etc/modules and add

Code:

modprobe asus-nb-wmi

? can you please clarify this?

Thanks

joe_2000 · 05-26-2013, 12:41 PM

You just need to add a new line that says

Code:

asus-nb-wmi

to the file /etc/modules

This makes the system load this module automatically at boot.

jgezau · 05-26-2013, 02:38 PM

I do not have /etc/modules, but have a directory /etc/modules-load.d/ so I created asus-nb-wmi.conf in there, but still did not work after rebooting the laptop. So I created the file under /etc/modprobe.d/ and worked perfectly after rebooting the laptop. Thanks