GENERAL

The MSI Keyboard Light Manager (MSIKLM) is an easy-to-use tool that allows to configure the SteelSeries keyboards of MSI gaming notebooks with Linux in almost the same way as the SteelSeries Engine can do using Windows.

INSTALLATION & REQUIREMENTS

Manual installation

I tried to keep the external dependencies to a minimum level, however there are some unavoidable ones. These are:

• GCC - the C compiler
• make - the main build tool of the Linux world
• LIBUSB - MSIKLM needs to communicate with the keyboard, for this LIBUSB is required

Besides there are no others, no Qt, no Java, not even a C++ compiler is required. To install the program, there is an installation script 'install.sh' which can be run by opening the respective folder in a terminal and typing

./install.sh

or if there are any problems you can try

bash install.sh

as well which will most certainly will work on most Linux distributions. This script will do the following steps, if you do not want to use the installation script for some reason, you can use the manual commands instead:

• installation of the dependencies

  sudo apt-get install -y gcc make libhidapi-dev
  

• compiling of MSIKLM

  make
  

• clean up

  make clean
  

• copy the built program to '/usr/local/bin/msiklm' and set its permissions

  sudo mv -fv msiklm /usr/local/bin/msiklm
  sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/msiklm
  

• test the connection

  sudo msiklm test
  

Whenever MSIKLM is used, it should always be run as root because otherwise, the communication with the keyboard is not possible, hence always use the sudo prefix (only 'msiklm help' will work as non-root).

Distribution package

Currently, the only linux distribution providing an install method is Archlinux, via the AUR repository

• Archlinux : https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/msiklm-git/

USABILITY

MSIKLM is a pure command line application, however its keyboard illumination control functionality is encapsulated such that it could easily be integrated into a graphical user interface. However, I neither wrote one for it nor I plan to do so. It is quite easy to use, and here is how to use it. It always has to be called with at least one argument, i.e. running it without one will result in an error. Here is an overview over the valid commands:

command	valid arguments	example
sudo msiklm <color>	none, off (equivalent to none), red, orange, yellow, green, sky, blue, purple, white	sudo msiklm green
sudo msiklm <color_left>,<color_middle>,<color_right>	same as single color (important: no space between the colors!)	sudo msiklm green,blue,red
sudo msiklm <mode>	normal, gaming, breathe, demo, wave	sudo msiklm wave
sudo msiklm <color> <brightness>	color either one or three values (comma-separated), brightness can be off, low, medium, high	sudo msiklm green high
sudo msiklm <color> <mode>	same as above	sudo msiklm green,blue,red wave
sudo msiklm <color> <brightness> <mode>	same as above	sudo msiklm green,blue,red high wave

Additionally, there are three extra commands that might be useful if something does not work:

msiklm help         -> shows the program's help
sudo msiklm test    -> tests if a compatible keyboard is found
sudo msiklm list    -> lists all found hid devices, this might be helpful if your keyboard is not detected by MSIKLM

AUTOSTART

An important additional feature is the optional autostart functionality since the keyboard will reset itself to its default color configuration whenever you reboot it or resume from standby. Hence, it is really useful to automatically reconfigure the keyboard to your configuration of choice. To do this, there is an extra script called 'autostart.sh' that can do this for you. This script registers MSIKLM to the udev service (more precisely it registers the keyboard to the udev service which calls MSIKLM as soon as the keyboard is detected) by creating a rule file:

/etc/udev/rules.d/99-msiklm.rules

To create this file including your MSIKLM arguments of choice, run:

./autostart.sh <your arguments>

Try if everything works by first rebooting your system and then try a standby and wakeup. If everything works, we are done here. If not, please report an issue. :-)

Finally the autostart can be disabled by running

./autostart.sh --disable

which will disable the autostart by removing the rule file.

Important remark: If you already used a previous version of MSIKLM, please undo the previous autostart functionality by removing MSIKLM calls from 'etc/rc.local' as well as simply delete MSIKLM wakeup scripts from the paths:

/lib/systemd/system-sleep/
/usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/

UNINSTALLATION

MSIKLM also comes with an uninstallation script uninstall.sh which will remove the program file /usr/local/bin/msiklm as well as running ./autostart --disable, i.e. it disables the autostart. If you want to use it, simply run:

./uninstall.sh

DEVELOPPER INFORMATION

The source code is splitted into three files: The main application (main.c) that converts the input as well as a small library that contains the main features (msiklm.h and msiklm.c). It provides a simple C API and hence allows an easy integration into different programs like maybe a small graphical user interface.