tweaking new dell laptop: "Fn" keys and system beep

[matt.price at utoronto.ca]

Hi Ubuntu,

just got a new laptop!  very nice, a dell latitude d820.  Ubuntu installed
pretty well unproblematically, but there's still a few things left to tweak... 
 Most important I guess is the suspend behaviour.  I've tested the "hibernate"
option in the gnome logout menu and it works great (first machine I've ever had
where kernel-level suspend works without suspend2 compiled in!)  The "hibernate"
button (Fn+ F1) works well, too.  However what I really wnat to do is to enable
the "Standby" button ("FN"+Esc),.  In fact most of the blue "Fn" keys don't
currently do anything -- this includes the "battery", "CRT/LCD" and number-pad
keys.  The screen brightness controls DO work, though, as do the volume controls.  

all of these keys, unsurprisingly, seemed towork pretty well in windows before I
installed ubuntu.

I guess I need to somehow identify the events generated by each keypress, but
I'm not aware of how that's done.  Any hints greatly appreciated!  thanks,

matt