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

[Jaime Davila]

matt.price at utoronto.ca wrote:
> 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
> 
Whenever the operating system detects one of those function keys being 
pressed, it will log the fact in file /var/log/acpid . So "sudo cat 
/var/log/acpid" will show you what has been detected.

-- 

******************************************************
Jaime J. Davila
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Hampshire College
School of Cognitive Science
jdavila at hampshire dot edu
http://helios.hampshire.edu/jdavila
*******************************************************