Had the good fortune to get myself a brand new laptop from old stock at the beginning of the week. It's a 2019 Dell Latitude 5590, which had never been out of its box. Price was a pitance, and it's a nice improvement compared to my previous laptop, more or less 10 yo already.
Had two surprises as well : Windows was not installed, and a backlit keyboard.
Installed the latest Zorin Os right away, probably my smoothed Linux install ever. Everything is working from scratch, even the silly joystick, right in the middle of the keyboard, and even the "calc" key, right above the keypad. Never seen that key, it's a first for me, and I've been dabbling with computers since 1983...
But... the keyboard is no longer backlit, and I've no idea how to set it back on.
It's not a real problem, but it's a nice feature. Anybody has a suggestion to remedy that ?
Some development... No idea why, nor how, but the keyboard just lit itself a few minutes ago... Puzzling ! I can't figure out where the hell the change does come from. I had just modified the screen light and suddenly, KAZAM, my keyboard was bright as day.
I won't complain, but I've yet to figure out how to set it on or off... Any ideas, people ?
These magic happenings are more expected with sound issues than keyboard backlight. I hope it stays lit and well behaved if you have put your genie back to bed.
Checked if any firmware updates were needed. Applied them, but no change, still the same erratic behaviour : on without touching anything, off just the same, required key combination is useless most of the time, and can't get anything from the command line...
Well, after 2 months, and the 17.2 upgrade : no change. The keyboard light gets randomly on or off, without any logic, the "fn+F10" combination, supposed to do act as a switch, is useless as ever. Puzzling...
That it comes on and that it works sometimes hints that it is not driver or software. It may be - it just reduces that likelihood.
I had a different yet similar issue with my keyboard. Frustrated, one day, I took it apart and examined the inside. Nothing looked wrong at all. I cleaned everything thoroughly and I reassembled it - and it stopped the erratic behavior.
This remained for several months, then the erratic behavior returned. I Began the process again intent to clean it but a phone call interrupted and I needed to quickly put the keyboard back together without cleaning it and do some work... and the erratic behavior stopped.
Three months later (about) the keyboard suddenly declared "oh, I am dying" and did. Two X's over the eyes and everything. All the kings horses and all the kings men...
I bought a new keyboard.
That stopped the erratic behavior and it has not returned since.
Well, maybe. Just one problem : taking apart a keyboard on a laptop is not something you can do in a rush, and just right now, free time is very expensive commodity right now in my life. I'll keep a lid on it for the time being.
I'd also take a look in the BIOS settings. Usually, DELL notebooks have an auto feature where backlit keyboards start working according to the amount of light present in the environment and will only come on once you start using the keyboard. That was my experience with the E6500.