Hello everyone!
I just got my GMMK Tenkeyless keyboard, which is the first one I own with RGB. I would love to be able to customise the RGB, but being brand new to it I’m a bit lost.
A little preface: I am on Linux. I think this is important later on when I mention Via.
So to start, I looked on the supported keyboards page on the qmk website, and couldn’t find my keyboard by searching for GMMK. Furthermore, if I go to the Glorious Gaming site I can’t find any other keyboards other than what appear to be their current flagship ones (hence I can’t find any specific board information or anything like that). One thing i did find is the software for the GMMK 1 TKL from here, but it is an .exe and hence I can’t use it. I did think of running it through wine, but given that there will be firmware flashing involved I’d rather not risk going through a compatibility layer or messing anything up.
I also tried the Via webapp, but when I try to Authorize device I get a browser popup in my permissions section which states that there are no compatible devices found. I’m unsure if this is because it is not supported by Via or if its because it can’t detect it because I am on Linux.
I also went through the qmk configurator but unsurprisingly my specific model was not in the list seeing as I couldn’t find it in the supported keyboards list I mentioned earlier.
So finally for my question: Is there any way I can configure the RGB on my keyboard without having to find a windows machine and using the GMMK 1 software?
Many thanks in advance!
Unfortunately as you found out QMK is not officially supported. But there is a port called SonixQMK which supports this board. This firmware also supports OpenRGB, so you can integrate the light even better in your setup.
I went to the link you mentioned and saw that indeed my keyboard is compatible, but I have no idea how to proceed from there. I’ll probably take the keyboard to work tomorrow where the PCs are windows and give the official software a try, but just for the future if I need it (or if anyone comes across this post and needs help), could you point me in the right direction to learn about what you said? As I said in my OP I’m completely new to this level of keyboard customisation so please be patient with me seeing as I know pretty much nothing about it.
Thanks though!
I’m not familiar with GMMK boards, usually you’d use dfu-util to flash the QMK firmware, maybe if you can save/extract the firmware bin file from the exe (dry run it in Wine perhaps?), you could flash it using dfu. But I’d first check if your board supports that.
But you could always just install Windows to a USB stick and boot from it, you don’t need to find a separate Windows machine. I mean, you don’t even need to even buy a license or anything so you’ve got nothing to lose here.
And in case you’ve got an existing Ventoy USB, then you can just install Windows in a VM, and drop the VHD into your Ventoy USB so it doesn’t pollute your drive with a bunch of files. You’ll end up with a nice and self-contained copy of Windows, just like any other Linux ISO, and you can use it in situations like this without feeling guilty of dirtying your PC.
About the saving/extracting the already existing firmware from my keyboard, could you please give me a very general guide on how to do that, or at least point me in the right direction of searching this stuff up? Whatever path I end up taking, I guess having the default firmware saved is always a plus just in case something goes wrong in the future. As for the remaining part of your comment, I don’t think I’ll mess about with that too much. I already have fairly easy access to windows PCs at work that I can try this stuff with, I just prefer not having to rely on them too much for personal stuff. I do have ventoy with a windows 10 iso on it, but the rest of what you wrote related to that might as well be Chinese to me.