Benedikt Wolters

I’ using Lubuntu 13.04 more and more often lately on my Samsung Series 7 Chronos 700Z5A. While the most things worked pretty right out of the box. It took me a while to figure out why the adjustable keyboard backlight FN-Keys were not working. While there are plenty resources available for the Series 9 but no one in particular for Lubuntu and openboxi/i3 i’ve decided to share the knowledgde with the public and not only with google and the NSA.

The first think i’ve noticed that the standard installation has already loaded the samsung_labtob kernel module. You may check that by running

You also can test if the module works by setting a value between 1 and 8 to the backlight driver:

Unfortunately the udev mappings were not defined so i had to manually add the following lines to my /lib/udev/keymaps/samsung-other

and also add the following to the /lib/udev/keymaps/force-release/samsung-other

You may have to reload udev by

and reboot. After that you can check whether your mappings work by running

the kbdillumup and kbdillumdown events should appear.

Now the next thing we need to do is bind those keyboard events to an action. In order to allow a script to change the driver values i’ve setup a init script in /etc/init.d/brightness.sh

and gave it execution rights. Furthermore, i’ve added the following line to my /etc/rc.local that executes that script

Then, i wrote a tiny shell script in my home directory /home/bewo/Scripts/backlight.sh that allows me to increment or decrement the current backlight value

In order tu run it without a prefix-path i’ve created a symbolic link to it

Finally all was left to do is to bind my shell script in OpenBox by adding the following keybinds to my .config/openbox/lubuntu-rc.xml:

When you’re using i3 you can add the following to your .i3/config analogically

If that does not work check by running xev if you’re bindings trigger the proper X11 events.