Light Up Your Razer Peripherals In Linux Mint

Photo by Emmanuel on Unsplash

A tutorial for installing OpenRazer and Polychromatic

I’ve been slowly building a Linux Mint desk setup in the basement, and this weekend I added an old Razer BlackWidow Lite keyboard and Naga Hex mouse to the mix. As expected, they were plug & play functional out of the box, but the keyboard didn’t have its backlighting enabled. This will simply not do.

Luckily, Razer has pretty good support for Linux with its OpenRazer project.

Installing is pretty simple, but lighting still wasn’t enabled. It took a few minutes of research to figure out that I also needed to install Polychromatic.

So it’s really a 3-step process but still very easy. Here’s how to do it!

Step 1 – Install OpenRazer

Open a terminal and run the following commands:

sudo apt install software-properties-gtk
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openrazer/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install openrazer-meta

Step 2 – Install Polychromatic

Open a terminal and run the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:polychromatic/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install polychromatic

Step 3 – Configure Polychromatic

Now you can run Polychromatic Controller to enable the lighting effects. I found and launched it by typing “poly” in the system menu.

Polychromatic detected both of my peripherals and allowed me to configure them just as I expected.

Once I selected the static lighting effect and turned up the brightness, the keyboard lit up. Very exciting. Now everything’s working exactly how I hoped and expected!