HAL, and laptop Fn and hardware keys

[Danny Kukawka]

On Tuesday 20 September 2005 17:28, 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
> 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.

There is already a daemon with a concept to abstract keys for Laptops and all 
other keyboard: IAL (Input Abstraction Layer). Take a look at the project 
page: http://developer.berlios.de/projects/ial 

This daemon use D-Bus and replace e.g. fnfxd. 

Cheers,

Danny