Ok I debated with myself whether or not to post a new thread but there aren't any exact questions that match.

I'm a distrohopping jerk, just to have that out of the way and tend to reinstall my laptop every other week (for fun) and I tend to get stuck in Kubuntu in the end (as thats where I feel most at ease). I've noticed an odd thing that I don't want to do a bug report over but merely would like to ask if someone knew the reason for.

In Ubuntu Unity and Gnome all keyboard FN-buttons for brightness, sound and keyboard backlight work fine. Ootb etc. But in Kubuntu, same kernel and same version of Ubuntu base they don't. I've tried fixing it with "acpi_osi= " (and the windows2012 one and so on) but for some reason the best I can get is screen brightness up/down but without an indicator (the little pop-up bar telling me at what percentage I'm at). Sometimes the keyboard backlight slider (under battery and power management) turns up, then after a few days (for some reason I've gotten into my head that it happens after installing Aurora Themes but that seems unlikely) its just gone from the battery and the settings manager.

But my main question is not "how can I fix it" (although if you know something about it, don't hesitate to say) but mostly - "why the disparity between them?". The only uniting factor I can think of is the desktop environment as that seems to be the central theme.

In theory, if they work under Unity then they should also work in KDE as both use X. Have you tried changing the global shortcuts for volume, by opening KMix > Configure Shortcuts? Please note that KMix needs to be running for the shortcut keys to work.

In terms of the keyboard backlight I don't have an idea i'm afraid, but for the screen brightness you could try checking in System Settings > Shortcuts & Gestures > Global Keyboard Shortcuts, under the category "KDE Daemon" to see if those shortcuts also need remapping.

Hello,

I am running OpenSuse 13.1 (64bit) and just got the same problem. On install the back-light was showing and working in the power applet in the system tray. Also the function keys for increasing and decreasing back-light were working perfectly as well as the on screen bar showing the level when using the function keys.

Now 10 days later, without apparent reason, the keys stopped working and it also does not show up in the power management applet. So I can't control the back-light anymore. All related to screen brightness still works.

I did accept some updates but do not know if that is the cause. I accepted them without looking what they were...

If anyone knows what to do to reactivate this I'd be very happy. I bought this model (Asus Zenbook) especially as it had the keyboard back-light.

Maybe just uninstalling and again installing the program responsible would fix it? What is the name of the program?

Dada

Did you enable automatic login by any chance? Try logging out and back in again - if your system starts up and automatically logs you in too quickly, the components responsible for allowing you to manage/control your screen and keyboard brightness won't have had time to load - so KDE cannot detect them.

Hello,

That did it! Thanks so much for the quick response and solution.
Do I need to do something to make it permanent?
Would disabling the automatic login be enough?

Sincerely,
Dada

PS How to stop the auto log in? I looked in "Configure Desktop" - "Login Screen" and on the last tab "Convenience": the auto login as well as the password-less log in are disabled. Just in case I also changed the "Preselect User" to "None"

Still it's automatically logging me in after I shut down and restart the computer. Something seems to be not quite working I would expect. Is there a something I am doing wrong or in case it's broken is there a place to manually edit it?

Disabling automatic login should be sufficient to solve this, yes. Ideally processes would startup faster, so reordering the boot process to put KDE later on could potentially solve it as well.

In terms of where automatic login is configured, there are two places it can be done. The place you checked is the KDE provided method, however most distributions also offer their own method as well. In openSUSE at least this is done in YaST.

Well it's hard if the KDE config does not work and I have not been able to find anything in Yeast.
In any case I rarely turn off the computer, I just close the lid. So it's not really a problem.
Still it would be nice if it worked consistently.
That said... I am very grateful for all the work of 100s of people that brought it already this far!!!
And for the friendly help when finding oneself in trouble.
Surely also these things will be ironed out. Sorry that I can't help directly.
Sincerely,
Dada

The KDE configuration options do not work in this case as the autologin functionality is not being provided by KDE.

In terms of solving it, I suggest asking in your distribution's forums how to disable autologin, as they'll be able to point you to the specific location to change that setting.

Hello,

Yes, I will inquire on the OpenSuse forum to see if someone can tell me where to make this change.

At the same time I'd suggest that configuration modules in KDE should be able to have an inactive state if they can't be used on a particular distribution. It is rather confusing that the findable and logical place to configure something seems to work but does not and the place where it does need to be configured is hidden. I really tried all the things in Yeast that could remotely be related to auto log in.

Of course the KDE team can not help it if a distribution bypasses the configuration panel for certain items, but maybe it is possible to give the distribution the ability to gray-out the things they take over, and maybe even providing a way to insert a text string providing info of where to look for the distribution specific place to configure those settings, this could make things a lot clearer without taking away the freedom to do things differntly.

Especially for end users not familiar with the underlying structure the way things are now is really confusing. I have worked with computers for 35 years, and even though not worked in that field I studied computer engineering so I am not quite the average user. Mostly I figure things out without or with little help, even in systems new to me like Linux.

Hope my suggestion may be of use. I'll make similar suggestion with OpenSuse and see, who knows it's really simple to implement and useful enough for someone to volunteer the time.

Thanks again and... I am very happy that with your suggestion for the work around the keyboard back-light can be controlled again!

Sincerely,
Dada