How To Enable Experimental Devices

NOTE: This guide assumes your system uses systemd. If you do not know what this means, you can proceed as most major Linux distributions use it.

Testing experimental devices temporarily

Before making any changes, it is important to test the level of support for the experimental devices. Although unlikely, your device can misbehave, or even become completely non functional while ckb-next-daemon is running due to incomplete experimental support.

To test it temporarily, stop the ckb-next-daemon service by running in a terminal:

sudo systemctl stop ckb-next-daemon

and then start ckb-next-daemon manually with experimental support enabled:

sudo ckb-next-daemon --enable-experimental

You can now test the functionality of the device.

NOTE: If the above command returns sudo: ckb-next-daemon: command not found, then it's possible your Linux distribution has placed the daemon somewhere else. You can run systemctl cat ckb-next-daemon and then look at the ExecStart= line to get the path. For example, it may show ExecStart=/usr/libexec/ckb-next-daemon. In this case, you will need to run sudo /usr/libexec/ckb-next-daemon --enable-experimental.

If the level of support provided is satisfactory for daily use, these changes can be applied permanently, as shown in the next section.

Otherwise, you can press Ctrl + C to stop ckb-next-daemon and then re-start it using systemd:

sudo systemctl start ckb-next-daemon

Your devices should now function as before.

If your experimentally supported device is a keyboard and it stopped functioning while experimental support was enabled, you will need to plug in a different keyboard to stop ckb-next-daemon in order to regain control. It might be possible to press X on the terminal that ckb-next-daemon is running using the mouse to avoid a reboot. A device unplug/replug will also be necessary afterwards.

Enabling experimental support on boot

If everything went well and you wish to enable experimental support for every boot, in a terminal run:

sudo EDITOR=nano systemctl edit ckb-next-daemon

In there, paste the following at the beginning of the file:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/ckb-next-daemon --enable-experimental

WARNING: The path might not always be /usr/bin/ckb-next-daemon. When running the sudo systemctl edit ckb-next-daemon command, there should be an ExecStart= line in blue near the bottom. You can simply copy the path from that one and use it instead of /usr/bin/ckb-next-daemon in the pasted text.

Finally, to save the changes and close the text editor, press Ctrl + X, then Y and lastly Enter.

Then, restart the daemon:

sudo systemctl restart ckb-next-daemon

Disabling experimental support on boot

To revert the changes, simply run

sudo systemctl revert ckb-next-daemon
sudo systemctl restart ckb-next-daemon