Clevo Keyboard Backlight Control For Linux

Guide to enable and set RGB keyboard colour for any Clevo laptop with any GNU/Linux distro! Finally.

There is no doubt, that not having control over your keyboard backlight is quite frustrating. The blue keyboard light is simply quite annoying, and it doesn’t turn on after suspend. Even if you did not purchase your laptop at NovaCustom, you can still use this guide to get your backlight working, in contrast to other vendors, such as System76. By the way, this guide should work for any new Clevo based brand, such as Sager, Schenker, XMG, Bestware, BTO, XNB and so on.

Requirements

Please be sure that you have updated your system entirely. Your kernel might have been upgraded, so please be sure you have restarted your laptop after fully updating your laptop.


Special note (September 2023)

Tuxedo has decided to restrict the use of the keyboard application to Tuxedo laptops. Therefore, we forked the repository and made it available for all Clevo laptops again. Moreover, we simplified the process.

Instructions NEW version


As soon as the RGB keyboard application is active, you can change the keyboard illumination by holding the Fn key and use the keyboard control keys on the right side of your keyboard.

Open a terminal window (CTRL+ALT+T) and execute the following line.

wget https://github.com/wessel-novacustom/clevo-keyboard/raw/master/kb.sh && chmod +x kb.sh && sudo ./kb.sh

Now, reboot your laptop. The application should work now. You might want to remove the installation files with the following command:

sudo rm -rf ~/clevo-keyboard/ && rm ~/kb.sh

Instructions OLD version

After the installation of the clevo-xsm-wmi application, you can change the keyboard illumination with these function keys.

Changing the identity might be required in order to use the clevo-xsm-wmi application.

Select a nice start-up colour:
Select the keyboard brightness:

Download the clevo-xsm-wmi repository from TUXEDO Computers (thank you guys).

Once the repository finished downloading, extract the packagerename the package to ‘rgbcontrol‘ (without quotes) and go into the folder rgbcontrol/module. There is a file listed here, it’s called ‘clevo-xsm-wmi.c‘. Open it with a text editor and find;

– Your laptop model. If you don’t know your laptop model, open a Terminal window (CTRL+ALT+T) and execute:

sudo dmidecode | grep "Product Name"

Scroll all the way up and your laptop model (product name) is mentioned there.

Is your laptop model not in the list? Then replace one by your laptop model! Replace:

– ‘Clevo P95_HP’, if you have RGB keyboard only without bar light at the front of the laptop.
– ‘Clevo P870DM’, if you have RGB keyboard with bar light at the front of the laptop.

, by your laptop model product name.

Open a Terminal window again (CTRL+ALT+T), execute the following code.

cd Downloads
cd rgbcontrol
cd module
sudo apt install gcc make
make && sudo make install
sudo insmod clevo-xsm-wmi.ko
sudo install -m644 clevo-xsm-wmi.ko /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/extra
sudo depmod
sudo tee /etc/modules-load.d/clevo-xsm-wmi.conf <<< clevo-xsm-wmi
sudo update-initramfs -uk all

Ignore the errors after "make && sudo make install".

The clevo-xsm-wmi application is installed now. Let's set a default colour! This default colour is set on startup. You can choose 'white white white', for example. Other colours you can set: green, red, blue, yellow, magenta, cyan. You can also set the keyboard brightness. Just select your preference on the left side of this page and copy-paste the code below!

sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/clevo-xsm-wmi.conf <<< 'options clevo-xsm-wmi kb_color=white,white,white, kb_brightness=1'

That’s it!


Remove the software

If you want to remove the software, please execute:

sudo rmmod clevo-xsm-wmi
sudo rmmod tuxedo_keyboard
sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/tuxedo_keyboard.conf