Dell Inspiron 7370 Keyboard Backlight Brightness

Technical Issues & Assistance
#1

Archlabs 2020-11-04
Linux kernel 5.4.97-1-lts

At shutdown yesterday this was working fine. On boot this morning the keyboard is set at Dim. I went into BIOS>System and set the keyboard illumination: Bright>Apply>Exit
When the boot process is complete the keyboard has been reset to Dim.

I suspect this may have something to do with a kernel update installed yesterday. Any clues?

#2

Check

 cat /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::kbd_backlight/{max_,}brightness

See also Keyboard backlight - ArchWiki

#3

Check systemd-backlight.

Or, you could use brightnessctl to control it yourself. Put this line in your ~/.xprofile.

brightnessctl --device='your_device' set your_desired_brightness &

You need to either setuid for brightnessctl or give write permission to your keyboard backlight led device file.

2 Likes
#4

Thank you. I installed brightnessctl and it seems to be working, based on what it is returning in the terminal. Difficult to tell visually because I am currently in rather bright daylight.

Is this program overriding the setting in BIOS?