OpenRGB Tempglow

Simple per-part RGB lighting for Linux PCs — with fans that turn red when things get too hot.
한국어

OpenRGB can talk to almost every RGB controller, but setting up "white case, slowly breathing fans, red when overheating" means juggling devices, zones and profiles. Tempglow sits on top of OpenRGB and turns your PC into four simple parts:

Each part gets its own effect (static, breathing, rainbow, off), color, brightness and speed — or change everything at once. A small background service applies your settings and watches CPU/GPU temperatures; past the limit, the parts you choose switch to an alert color, and switch back once things cool down. Schedules can turn parts off, dim them or change their lighting at set times.

Features

• Per-part and all-at-once lighting control, applied live as you drag a slider
• Schedules: during a daily time window, turn chosen parts off, dim them or switch them to another effect and color (weekday selection, windows may cross midnight)
• Overheat alert with hysteresis (CPU via k10temp/zenpower/coretemp, GPU via nvidia-smi or discrete amdgpu)
• Automatic device discovery; assign any OpenRGB zone to a part and set ARGB LED counts in the Devices tab
• Starts an OpenRGB server for you (installed package, Flatpak or AppImage) when none is running
• Built-in driver for Colorful iGame NVIDIA cards that OpenRGB doesn't list yet (e.g. RTX 5080)
• GTK 4 / libadwaita app, English and Korean UI

Requirements

• Linux with systemd (user services)
• OpenRGB 1.0 or newer — distro package, Flatpak or AppImage
• Python 3.10+, PyGObject, GTK 4 and libadwaita 1.5+ (Ubuntu 24.04+, Fedora 40+, Debian 13+, Arch)

Install

Ubuntu / Debian (.deb)

Download openrgb-tempglow_*_all.deb from the latest release:

sudo apt install ./openrgb-tempglow_*_all.deb
systemctl --user start openrgb-tempglow   # or log out and back in

Any distro (install script)

git clone https://github.com/yoobinkim541/openrgb-tempglow
cd openrgb-tempglow
./install.sh            # add --udev to also install OpenRGB's udev rules

Everything goes into your home directory (~/.local); no root is needed except for --udev. Remove it with ./install.sh --uninstall.

pipx

pipx install --system-site-packages openrgb-tempglow   # system site-packages provide PyGObject/GTK
tempglow-setup install                                  # desktop entry, icon and user service

First run

1. Permissions. OpenRGB needs udev rules to reach devices without root. If the Devices tab is empty or missing hardware, run tempglow-setup udev (uses OpenRGB's own rules, asks for sudo), then reboot or replug.
2. Assign zones. Open OpenRGB Tempglow → Devices. Zones get a part based on the device type (motherboard → case, RAM → RAM, cooler → fans, GPU → graphics card); fan headers usually need to be set to Fans by hand. For ARGB headers, set LED count to the number of LEDs connected. Keyboards, mice and other peripherals are left alone unless you assign them.
3. Pick colors on the Lighting tab, and alert settings on Alerts.

Tip: not sure which header is which? Give each one a different color under Lighting and look inside the case.

Command line

tempglowd --list-devices    show every zone and the part it belongs to (read-only)
tempglowd --simulate-hot    run in the foreground pretending the PC is overheating
tempglowd -v                foreground with debug logging
tempglow-setup install|uninstall|udev
journalctl --user -u openrgb-tempglow -f     service log

Settings live in ~/.config/openrgb-tempglow/config.json (edited by the app; the service reloads it automatically). status.json next to it is written by the service.

Troubleshooting

RAM isn't detected (AMD boards, often Gigabyte). Check sudo dmesg | grep -i "ACPI.*conflict". If you see SystemIO range ... conflicts with OpRegion ... SMBI, the BIOS has claimed the SMBus and the i2c_piix4 driver can't bind. The usual fix (also recommended by OpenRGB) is adding the kernel parameter acpi_enforce_resources=lax:

echo 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT acpi_enforce_resources=lax"' \
  | sudo tee /etc/default/grub.d/99-openrgb.cfg && sudo update-grub   # then reboot

This lets the kernel use a bus the firmware also uses; understand the trade-off before enabling it.

"OpenRGB was not found". Install OpenRGB 1.0+. AppImages are picked up from ~/Applications, ~/.local/bin or ~/Downloads; anything else can be set via openrgb.command in config.json, e.g. "command": ["/opt/openrgb/openrgb"].

Using the OpenRGB app at the same time. Tempglow connects to whatever server is listening on port 6742, so you can keep the OpenRGB window open with its SDK server enabled. Don't run another tool that also drives the same devices continuously.

How it works

 tempglow (GTK app) ── writes ──▶ config.json ◀── watches ── tempglowd (systemd user service)
                                                                │  25 fps effects, temps every 2 s
                                       OpenRGB SDK server ◀─────┤
                                       extra I2C drivers  ◀─────┘

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome. Run the tests with:

python3 -m venv --system-site-packages .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e '.[test]'
.venv/bin/pytest

New hardware that OpenRGB doesn't support is best added to OpenRGB itself; small built-in drivers here are a stop-gap (see src/openrgb_tempglow/drivers/).

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. Built on OpenRGB (GPL-2.0-or-later) and openrgb-python (GPL-3.0). The Colorful GPU protocol is ported from OpenRGB's ColorfulGPUController.