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Trying to search for things on Google has become a bit awkward with Gemini right there. I made an attempt to use Gemini from Google Search but its lack of context awareness and memory makes it nearly useless for technical projects. Thankfully, Claude really was far more helpful.

The desktop I used was once a powerful gaming system but these days it struggles to run things that even my year-old Lenovo Yogo can manage, so I decided to try using it as a headless server for running VMs and Docker containers. I’ll probably test some game servers and LLMs.

The case and keyboards LEDs are very cool, but also very bright, which doesn’t work well considering the only place I have to keep it right now is a bedroom.

In my case, mine runs Debian Trixie.

The package that actually worked for me is openrgb. I grabbed the URL for the AMD64 Debian Trixie version from their releases page using a wget command to pull it.

To install it, I ran this command:

dpkg -i openrgb_*trixie*.deb

That returned several errors indicating my system lacked several dependencies. The next command installed the required dependencies:

apt-get install -f

With those packages installed, I was ready to install openrgb itself with the same command I used earlier:

dpkg -i openrgb_*trixie*.deb

This time it installed successfully. The next step is to test if it works as expected.

This command will turn off the keyboard’s LEDs:

openrgb --device 1 --mode Off

It worked, so I moved on to the next command that should turn off the LEDs on the case. The case LEDs don’t have a true off mode, but setting them to black effectively turns them off:

openrgb --device 0 --mode Static --color 000000

Both commands worked for me. At that point I wanted to set up a service to ensure they would be turned off every time the system boots up and the service runs. The first step is to create a service file for systemd:

nano /etc/systemd/system/rgb-off.service

This opens nano and, if saved, will create the file in the proper location on the system. This is what my file looks like:

[Unit]
Description=Turn off RGB lighting
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStartPre=/sbin/modprobe i2c-dev
ExecStartPre=/sbin/modprobe i2c-piix4
ExecStart=/usr/bin/openrgb --device 0 --mode Static --color 000000
ExecStart=/usr/bin/openrgb --device 1 --mode Off
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

You’ll notice it included commands to identify the devices and then set those attributes via the commands used earlier.

The final step is to have systemd  reload all service files, enable this new service and then start it.

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable rgb-off.service
systemctl start rgb-off.service

All seems well so far. I just completed this today, so I don’t know if everything will behave as expected over time. But, it seems rather straightforward. I expect it to work.