Enabling keyboard lights in Fedora 35
I am running Fedora on a (by now pretty old) Sony Vaio notebook, and the keyboard lights stopped working after an update many years ago. I now upgraded to Fedora 35 to install the vaio-control-center, but it can not be launched on my computer because:
[martin@localhost ~]$ vaio-control-center
open_file: can't open /sys/devices/platform/sony-laptop/kbd_backlight_timeout: No such file or directory
I couldn't find any mention of this error anywhere, so I don't believe this is fixable.
Is there a way to turn on the keyboard light manually? I need it so rarely that turning it on and off in terminal would also do the trick for me. I found a method for this for Ubuntu, but it doesn't work in Fedora.
I know the lighting does work, because the lights do turn on when I touch a key during bootup. But once Fedora is running, the lights go out and stay out, so I am certain it has something to do with the OS setting, not a hardware issue.
My goal is to be able to get the lights on when I want to type in the dark. All three possible solutions would work for me.
- Is there a fix for the kbd_backlight_timeout issue?
- Can Fedora 35 be configured through terminal to turn the lights on for a few seconds when keys are pressed?
- Can the lights be forced on and off through a terminal command?
Solution 1:
This seems to be a known issue with RedHat/Fedora. You can read about at their bugzilla website.
Interestingly there is a "hacky" workaround to enable the Sony Vaio keyboard backlight functionality. If you suspend to RAM and then resume, the backlight may start to act normally.