HAL, and laptop Fn and hardware keys

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 21:06 +0200, Matthias Grimm wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Oct 2005 20:30:10 +0200
> Matthias Grimm <matthiasgrimm at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> 
> > And yes, I think there is a easy method to send input events from user
> > space if necessary through the uinput device. I'm going to check the
> > next days.
> 
> I played a bit with uinput the last days. It is not a big problem to
> create a virtual keyboard in user space and send key events to the
> kernel input layer. All depending programs will recognize this events
> including X11.

Cool, you got any semi-working code? I've been playing too, but can't
seen to register a working device.

> I thinks this is the way to go for special laptop buttons not supported
> by kernel driver. There is no need for a second key event distribution
> system like dbus and last but not least HALd don't have to cope with
> keys at all.

But we can include a *really* small addon that just waits for an acpi
event, and then fires off an event using uinput. Then things will "just
work" and we won't have daemons running for hardware we don't have.

> I don't know yet where this piece is placed in the big picture but as
> interim solution it would be easy to change IAL to use uinput instead
> of dbus.

I agree with you now, uinput seems the best way to do this. I wouldn't
mind betting the author or IAL might want to stick to using dbus tho...

Richard.