HAL, and laptop Fn and hardware keys

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 20:04 +0400, Andrey Borzenkov wrote:
> 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

Sorry, I meant /proc/acpi/toshiba/keys

> {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.

Well, hal can already handle buttons with state e.g. lid, and buttons
with action, e.g. sleep.

Richard.