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MacFoxG4

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 22, 2019
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So I got a Naxa USB gaming keyboard for Christmas and it has an RGB backlight. I can get this backlight to turn on in Windows on my Lenovo Ideapad and on Ubuntu on my 2009 Mini (though I had to use some terminal commands in order to do so). I have had no luck so far in getting the backlight to work on OS X. I have tried both Mojave on my 2009 Mini and Leopard on my Sawtooth and I can not get this backlight to come on. I tried an app called Lab Tick, but it said I had no backlit keyboard. Any ideas on how to get the backlight to come on on either Mojave or Leopard?

Thanks in advance.
 
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MacFoxG4

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 22, 2019
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Found a program called SetLEDs that at least works in Monterey on my 2009 Mini. It is a terminal-based program. Here are the commands I used:

Code:
./setleds -num -caps ^scroll
 

TheShortTimer

macrumors 68040
Mar 27, 2017
3,249
5,639
London, UK
Congrats on getting it working. :)

Are you able to set up the program to auto-start whenever macOS loads or do you have to manually run it during every new session?
 
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MacFoxG4

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 22, 2019
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It looks like I have to run those commands in terminal every time. The settings go away after a restart. I couldn't find anything in the README about setting it up to auto-start.
 

MacFoxG4

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 22, 2019
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I decided to see if setleds was PPC compatible and discovered that it is not. Just for the heck of it, I opened up the source code in Xcode 3.1 under Leopard to see if I could maybe recompile it for PPC and it doesn't look like I can. I at least did find out that apparently the target OS was Sierra according to the Build info for the executable.
 
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Wowfunhappy

macrumors 68000
Mar 12, 2019
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I decided to see if setleds was PPC compatible and discovered that it is not. Just for the heck of it, I opened up the source code in Xcode 3.1 under Leopard to see if I could maybe recompile it for PPC and it doesn't look like I can. I at least did find out that apparently the target OS was Sierra according to the Build info for the executable.
It looks like a basic C program, I recommend just running `make` in the Terminal directly to see if it compiles.
 

Wowfunhappy

macrumors 68000
Mar 12, 2019
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I happened to have a 10.6 VM open, so I thought I'd try compiling a universal binary. Unfortunately, the old compiler built into Snow Leopard didn't work.

So I tried MacPorts's compiler:

Code:
CC=/opt/local/bin/clang-mp-11 MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4 make

I don't have any fancy RGB keyboards to test with, but this seemed to work fine, see attached binary. It should work even on Tiger since I set the deployment target.

But, MacPorts's newer compilers can't cross-compile for PPC on Intel and vice-versa. So, someone with a PPC machine would need to do it, with whatever MacPorts's most modern PPC compiler is (I think it's gcc7).
 

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