Comment 8 for bug 128786

I have the same problem and did some investigations.

The error message "Not primary DBus name owner" occurs because the pommed daemon is already running in the background and you can't start it twice. (Well, you can, but you get this dbus error.)

Do a "pgrep pommed", it will return a process id, then do a "sudo kill" for this process id. This will kill the daemon and after that you can "sudo pommed -d" from the console without any errors.

If applesmc was not yet added to "/etc/modules", pommed will run but never receive any dbus messages from the light sensor. The output in the console will be:

Processing DBus requests
Checking messages
Done with DBus requests
Processing DBus requests
Checking messages
Done with DBus requests
Processing DBus requests
Checking messages
Done with DBus requests
...

If you add applesmc to the /etc/modules file, reboot, kill the pommed daemon and start pommed -d from the console you can see from pommed's output that it works fine, it receive dbus messages and automatic keyboard illumination will work.

I verified that pommed does NOT ignore the settings in "/etc/pommed.conf".

However, even though applesmc is running, and pommed works when executed in the console, I still have the problem that on every boot the keyboard backlight is turned on!

I noticed that even when neither the pommed daemon nor pommed in the console is running, changing the backlight intensity with (FN-) F8/F9/F10 still works. I have no idea why.