ThinkPenguin Korora Notebook

Touchpad
The Touchpad takes a lot of physical physical space under the keyboard, and it's easy to accidentally move the mouse cursor while typing. Xfce allows you to "Disable touchpad while typing" to address this, which just shuts off the touchpad for 2 seconds using. Since the  program is installed by the, follow the synaptics driver installation instructions.

Backlight
The kernel parameter  must be added to make the backlight adjustable.

The backlight setting is not persistent between reboots, but it is persistent between suspend. Create a local service to save and apply the backlight setting: