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I'm using Ubuntu 13.04 on my ThinkPad T430 and want to use the pidgin-blinklight plugin.

The plugin says it needs ibm-acpi, but that's depricated as far as I can tell, and thinkpad_acpi is loaded by default on my machine:

$ sudo lsmod| grep acpi
thinkpad_acpi          81222  0

Is there a way to get it working with thinkpad_acpi instead of the ibm one?

SkaveRat
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    I’m the author of `pidgin-blinklight`, and I cannot use it myself for the reasons mentioned by @Muling. But it seems that the [power LED is controllable](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1250057), maybe I’ll use that as a fallback; I just need a reliable way to detect that the machine is affected by this issue – what do you think? – Joachim Breitner Dec 24 '13 at 12:16

3 Answers3

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Unfortunately there is no known possibility to control the thinklight on that laptop, other than off. You can try it when your thinklight is on echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/tpacpi\:\:thinklight/device/leds/tpacpi\:\:thinklight/brightness. Putting 255 as value to turn it on does not work anymore.

Maybe it has something to do with the new backlight, but i am not sure.

Muling
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I know this question is ancient, but for anyone else who is wondering, the below solution works for me on my T430s under Kubuntu 14.04:

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/5f87sg/hint_blinking_the_thinklight_with_software_on_new/

In case the reddit link disappears: compile this to an executable called ec_access:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/tools/power/acpi/tools/ec/ec_access.c

Then do

./ec_access -w 0x3b -v 16

to switch on, and

./ec_access -w 0x3b -v 14

to switch off.

SSJ_GZ
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The plugin says it needs ibm-acpi, but that's depricated as far as I can tell, and thinkpad_acpi is loaded by default on my machine:

Although the kernel module name has changed, the userspace interface has not. The think-light is still controlled via /proc/acpi/ibm/light. A quick 'strings' check on pidgin-blinklight shows that path is still in the binary.

So my educated guess is that it should work as is.

ewhac
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