HAL, and laptop Fn and hardware keys

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 18:23 +0200, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> 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. 

Yes, the code looks good, but:

http://developer.berlios.de/project/stats/?group_id=2321

I'm not sure that it's seen much heavy testing...

Plus it only seems to support toshiba laptops, linux input events, and
acpi events. The other special buttons look completely unsupported.

Richard.