HAL, and laptop Fn and hardware keys

[Andrey Borzenkov]

On Tuesday 20 September 2005 19:28, Richard Hughes wrote:
> 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

Hmm ... I do not have this; does it need extra kernel patch? I have Mandriva 
cooker (2.6.12-12mdk) that does define CONFIG_ACPI_TOSHIBA; toshiba_acpi is 
loaded and contents of /proc/acpi/toshiba is

{pts/2}% l /proc/acpi/toshiba
fan  keys  lcd  version  video
{pts/2}% cat /proc/acpi/toshiba/version
driver:                  0.18
proc_interface:          1

The problem with this suggestion is, I presume meaning of these buttons is 
just as vendor specific as the way to watch for them; so I do not see any 
easy way to abstract them.

-andrey

> 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.
>
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