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Malikos

Member

Registered: 2015-12-12

Posts: 46

[SOLVED] Dell problem with keyboard backlight and fans

Hello,

I have 2 small problems with my Dell M3800 laptop. I use KDE and everything is up to date.

The first problem - keyboard backlight disables with screen and doesn't enable after moving mouse or keyboard press. My fn key works well, even keyboard backlight in plasma power settings works without problems, but if my backlight is on and I wait 10 min (time that I set in plasma power settings) my screen goes black, which of course is good, but my keyboard backlight shuts off at the same time and doesn't enable even after restart (I need to enable it manually). Is there a way to prevent this keyboard dimming along with the screen?

My second problem - sometimes (not always) when I log in to my system and KDE splash screen shows up, screen freezes for about 2 seconds and my fans go crazy, probably max. RPM during that period. After that the splash screen unfreezes and then everything works well as expected. Is there a way to check what causes this issue?

Thanks

[Edit]
Okay, solved it myself
Ad.1 - keyboard backlight can be very easily adjusted and configurated via dell_laptop module. More informations here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentatio … ell-laptop

Ad.2 - not really solved, but this workaround is working: after some googling I've finally found that this is a problem with dell_smm_hwmon module which needs to be blacklisted.

Last edited by Malikos (2017-02-27 18:52:44)