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

[Jaime Davila]

matt.price at utoronto.ca wrote:
> 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. 

Have you looked at /var/log/acpid ?


-- 

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