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

[matt.price at utoronto.ca]

Quoting John DeCarlo <johndecarlo at gmail.com>:

> On 6/14/06, matt.price at utoronto.ca <matt.price at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> >
> 
> matt,
> 
> I haven't followed the latest developments, but I have used the package
> "lineakd" for the extra Dell keys.  It is in Ubuntu "universe" repository.
> 

THanks John.  I think that lineakd only works with keys that generate keystroke
events, which (if I'm correct) the most important "Fn" keys don't seem to do. 
Instead, the latter create acpi events, which are monitored and intercepted by
acpid.  What I want to do is to find out what happens to the "standby"
(="suspend-to-ram") command after I press the standby key.  It seems that it's
not being received, since when I hit "echo "men" > /sys/power/state" I can in
fact make the computer suspend to ram. [in fact, to make things more
complicated, thesuspend-to-ram breaks both my networking and my display on
resume -- so to make it really work I am using the hibernate script, which lets
me turn off networking and unload the nvidia module before I suspend.  This
works very well).  

anyway, still workingo n this...

matt

> -- 
> John DeCarlo, My Views Are My Own
>