HAL, and laptop Fn and hardware keys

[Richard Hughes]

The extra key presses (e.g. Fn-F1, and other h/w buttons) on most
laptops are very vendor specific (Just like acpi brightness support) and
have lots of different hacky scripts and daemons to watch each of the
wacky interfaces. Sony has watched sonpid, and toshiba currently has
fnfxd. I'm sure the other laptop makes have their own scripts too.

What is the consensus of an addon, say hal-addon-<vendor>-buttons that
reports each of these events as a dbus signal, so that gnome control
center (or another more suitable gnome process) can do a specific
action?

The addon can be launched in the existing infrastructure just checking
for the existance of files/directories, e.g. /proc/acpi/toshiba/buttons
and would have *very low* overhead as most of the time it would be
sleeping.

This is currently a chicken and egg situation as no gnome application
can use the events, but there won't be any support until the events are
generated. 

Doing this in-HAL allows us to abstract out the vendor, and just have
the dbus interface, just like the LCD screen stuff.

Comments?

Richard.