Please help: using Fn buttons on laptop keyboard. KDE
 

Hi everyone.

Just migrated to Slackware 12 from KUbuntu a week ago and found some problems using the Fn buttons on my laptop.

when I was using ubuntu, my Fn buttons were configured automatically, so I had no problems with them.
However, Slack did not configure them, so I searched for some howtos on this topic.
I've used xev to determine the key codes for +-sound. Unfortunately it gave no output for brightness, mute sound and sleep mode buttons at all, however these are not as important for me as sound control.

Then I edited /etc/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap with
keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume

The next step is to edit the window manager keyboard config file, but I can't find any info on where it is for KDE wm. The howtos I found were only for icewm and fluxbox and were not of help to me =\

thank you for your help

Roman

I'm not in KDE, but you should be able to configure shortcuts from the Settings->Regional & Accessibility->Keyboard Shortcuts (or something similar). A whole list of actions should be there such as mute and volume control. Select an action and the press the key(s) you want to associate with that action.

In order for the screen brightness to work you will need the "video" module. "lsmod | grep video" to see if you have it and "modprobe video" to load it if you don't (and then add it/uncomment it in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules so that it loads automatically if you reboot).

Brian

Thanks Brian.
I'll try to set the video up.

The sound Fn buttons can't be set up with Settings tab in KDE, since the system is not recognizing the Fn button combination. For instance, I can set the shortcut for Win+F5 to increase volume, but it does not assign Fn+F5.

That's why i tried to xev it. xev's output gave 174 and 176 keycodes as stated before, but had no output for Fn+F7/8 for brightness/sleepmode.

What i'm trying to do now is to assign these keycodes to +-sound, but can't find the right config file.
For icewm it is supposed ot be in ~/.icewm/keys but its different from kde =(

Perhaps you need to change the keyboard layout. It should be in the same general area of the kde settings.

Brian

tried that with my Hp zv6000. doesn't work.

Very strange. Which layout did you choose? I've got a hp zv5000 and the Fn key works fine with the Generic 105-key intl layout.

Brian

i did not try the generic 105-intl, i went digging through all of the laptop versions for HP.

Ok, problem solved.

I just changed 104 to 105 in xorg.conf

Thanks for help

I'm trying to set my Gateway laptop (with the same 174/176 codes)

I'm using fluxbox, and there's a ~/.fluxbox/keys file, but I'm not sure what I'm doing once in the file. Could you explain what you were intending to put there? Was it those two lines in the first post? They don't work for me, gives a command not found when just entering "XF86AudioRaiseVolume" on the term window.