I've just bought a new acer aspire 9113 laptop and I am having problems configuring the keyboard and remote control.

First, I should explain that the remote control works at a hardware level and the OS sees it as if it was a keyboard. For example, if I press the volume up button on the remote, xev shows this:
The problem is that there are some buttons on the remote and some hotkeys on the laptop that don't generate an keypress event (according to xev) but they also don't have a scancode (according to showkey). Without a scancode, they are useless.

However, those keys do work with acer InstantOn Arcade.

Acer InstantOn arcade is a "feature" that allows you to get into acer arcade without booting windows and play dvds, see TV, play mp3s etc. In fact, it is a small linux system found in C:\Program Files\Acer Arcade\image, which is an ext3 disk image. It boots in almost 3 seconds and launches the linux version of arcade.

In there, I am able to use all the remote control buttons. Most of them are mapped to letters, so pressing "Stop" in a shell prints an "s" etc. (I've hacked it a bit to start busybox ash instead of arcade so I am able to get runtime information.) In their startup scripts, they use the setkeycode command to map scancodes to keycodes but in my suse system, there are no scancodes, so I assume that these scripts will do nothing if I run them on suse. I think it might be an extra module doing this, although in the startup scripts I can't see any related script/function.

Here is the output of `cat /proc/modules` (lsmod doen't exist in there)
Also, `cat /proc/version` shows linux 2.6.12.2 compiled with gcc 3.4.2


So, is there any way to make those keys work under suse?


PS: I may not reply before august 24th because I will be on vacations. Post any suggestions here and I will try them when I will be back. I can give you other information about InstantOn arcade if you want.

Well, I switched to gentoo and I followed a gentoo tutorial to make those keys work and they work now.
I shouldn't have used showkey. The scancodes appear in /var/log/messages

Note for users of this laptop: I managed to make the remote control work. The other buttons on the laptop (9 arcade buttons and 4 hotkeys) don't work neither in gentoo nor in InstantOn arcade. They don't seem to be part of the keyboard. They probably are a separate device that linux cannot see and control.

Just some more info for users of this laptop... InstantOn arcade is just a modded version of cyberlink powercinema for linux (PCMlinux). I found that today.

Thanks gkiagia for all this information
I couldn't have helped, because I did not know any of this, and I'm glad you told us.
Well done, by the way, you did extremely well.

Yves.

As this post is one of the top ten in google when I search for aspire 9113 and linux, I will announce here that I have made a website with all the information I collected and that I figured out about Acer Aspire 9113WLMi.

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