AlienFX is a Linux utility to control the lighting effects of your Alienware computer.

At present there is a CLI version (alienfx) and a gtk GUI version (alienfx-gtk). And has been tested on Debian/Ubuntu/Kali/Mint 19, Fedora and Arch Linux.

Table of Contents

• Dependencies
• Installation
• Usage
• Contributing

Dependencies

AlienFX is written in python and has been tested on python 3.6 (<2.1.1 using python 2.7). It requires the following python packages to run:

On Arch Linux:

For 2.0.6:

      $ sudo pacman -S python2-pyusb python2-setuptools python2-gobject python2-cairo

For 2.1+:

      $ sudo pacman -S python-pyusb python-setuptools python-gobject python-cairo python-future

On other distributions you need to install pyusb and pkg_resources using pip:

1. pkg_resources. You can install pkg_resources using the following command:

         $ pip install setuptools
   

2. pyusb >= 1.0.0b1. Note that your distribution may only provide the pre-1.0 version of pyusb. If this is the case, you can install pyusb 1.0 using the following command:

         $ pip install --pre pyusb
   

3. future. You can install future using the following command:

         $ pip install future
   

You can install all of these by running the command:

         $ pip install -r requirements.txt

And then install following packages using package manager:

On Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/Kali:

         $ sudo apt install libcairo2-dev python-gi python-gi-cairo

On Fedora:

         $ sudo dnf install cairo-devel pygobject3 cairo-gobject

Installation

On Arch Linux you can install package from AUR: alienfx

For manual installation of AlienFX, use the following commands:

    $ sudo python3 setup.py install

    $ sudo python3 setup.py install_data

Note that the second invocation is required to ensure that icon files etc. are properly installed.

The installation includes a udev rules file that allows AlienFX to access the AlienFX USB controller on your computer without needing root permissions. If you run the install commands without sudo, then the udev rules file will not be installed.

Usage

Lighting configurations are stored in "theme files", which are simple json files stored in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alienfx. If XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set, then ~/.config/alienfx is used. Both the CLI and GUI programs use these theme files, and the GUI program allows you to create new themes as well.

See the man page of alienfx $ man alienfx for the cli options supported.

If you run the CLI-version of alienfx on a currently unsupported device, the program will ask you if you wish to perform a zonescan. Please consider using this feature to determine the correct zone-codes for your device. If you found the correct codes, please contribute to the project. - You'll find more information in Section Contributing

Supported models and adding support for new models:

Please have a look at devicelist

Contributing

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for further details.

Further Information

If you look for further informations, have a look in docs/Knowledgebase

Disclaimer and License

If you use this software, you use it ON YOUR OWN RISK. I and the contributing developers DO NOT accept responsibility for frying your AlienFX controller chip with this code. Not fried any yet, but this is just so we can sleep at night. ;)

This software is licenced under the GPLv3

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This programm is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU GPL for more detail.