Special notebook keys: no output in either xev or dmesg

[Irfy]

Many of the special keys on my Asus N50Vn notebook do not work (fn+ combinations and extra buttons) - but some of them do, so there should be hope.

• xev gives no output when using those keys
• dmesg gives no output when using those keys

Had xev responded, I'd be able to assign the key out of the box and had dmesg responded, I'd know I need to play with freedesktop as explained here - but now my hands are kind of tied.

Any ideas?

I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64 with kernel 2.6.27-11-generic.

To get an idea of what works and what not, I attached a photo of the keyboard: x means no output in either xev or dmesg and o means it works. Note: The external playback and misc buttons appear to be only a set of 4 hardware (touch-kind-of) buttons, whose function is modified by a switch near them, marked with s.

-- Irfy

[Irfy]

bump?

[Mark Phelps]

Don't want to discourage you, but I recently upgraded my Tablet PC (Fujitsu T4020) to Intrepid and xev does not show anything for the bezel keys anymore. I restored back to my Hardy install and xev works just fine!

So, I suspect something is "broken" in Intrepid regarding xev seeing special keys.

[Irfy]

Did you have any output in dmesg when pressing your secial notebook keys?

-- Irfy

[Favux]

Hi Irfy and Mark,

I've been looking into similar issues. I appologize for the info dump I'm about to perform.

First from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IntrepidRele...ncompatibility:

X.Org evdev xmodmap incompatibility
The X keycodes generated with the new evdev input driver in X.Org 1.5 are not compatible with those generated in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and before. If you have configured keybindings for your user with a ~/.Xmodmap file, you will need to convert or disable it by hand on upgrade.

Then from Bryce Harrington at http://www2.bryceharrington.org:8080/drupal/node/63:

Non-functioning hotkeys - A large chunk of time this month went into investigating hotkey issues, particularly around the sleep/battery keys. That involved into digging through 'acpi-support', which I'm wondering if we need to just drop and go with straight HAL/pmutils. There are a ton of outstanding patches from Debian that we don't have, and even with them I think it may redundant. It's too late in Intrepid to do much more than duct tape, but for Jaunty this is going to need a lot of focus.

And an associated bug with link to another bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ev/+bug/269619. The bug it links to is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...al/+bug/267682 where Timo Aaltonen actually presents a .fdi file to prevent evdev from mistakenly grabbing things and making the battery key work.

Now this bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/278839 talks about stopping hotkey-setup and using showkey to extract some info. It also mentions gnome-settings-daemon and how to extract info from it.

X can only handly 256 distinct keycodes due to a protocol limitation, and due to evdev the keycodes are now standardized to match the Linux input layer - with no keycode below 256 that could reasonably be substituted for KEY_ZOOM. As a workaround, you can add your own fdi file to /etc/hal/fdi/information that maps this key to a different keycode (see /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/30-keymap-module-thinkpad-acpi.fdi for an example of how this is currently done).

Is from http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Instal...a_ThinkPad_X61

Alright, I hope there is something useful in there for you.

Good luck!

[Mark Phelps]

Thanks for the info. At least I now know it's not specifically my machine.

The acpi-support news is not good, at least, not for my machine. I read an extensive post about configuring an IBM thinkpad using acpi-support, so I started digging around in my directories -- and all the the files were empty! I looked in the directory where there are acpi files by PC brand and model, and there's nothing for my brand or model machine.

So, if they've dropped xev in favor of HAL and/or acpi-support, for my machine, that means no upgrading to the new versions!

And to think, I was so elated when I was able to get everything to work under Hardy and finally quit using Vista!!

[Mark Phelps]

Favux:

Thanks again for your reply. I did some reading about evdev and, from what I read, you still need to use xev to get the keycodes. The article said that if xev generated no code in response to your keypress, then either the xorg.conf or the .Xmodmap files are set up wrong -- and at least for Hardy, I know they are not. All I did in Intrepid was remove the comments that were inserted for HAL in the xorg.conf. I didn't make any changes to .Xmodmap.

If you have any more insight into this problem, could you please reply via my other thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1107026

Thanks

[Irfy]

Well I played around myself and managed to get every single key work.

I also made a little guide on how to do it at the ubuntu wiki. Tell me what you think about it.

[Favux]

Hi Irfy,

I think it is a great wiki. Nice job!

[Irfy]

Thanks. Ideally, you'd try out the instructions and report your problems, comments, suggestions etc. under the page's discussion page - that's the best way to improve the guide and help others