Re: Some function keys not working on a ThinkPad W550s

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 25 Nov 2016 23:27:46 -0200
Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Nov 2016, Celejar wrote:
> > applications and a few things from backports. I'm currently running
> > kernel 4.7.0-0.bpo.1-amd64 from backports.
> 
> Don't.  That kernel is very broken.  Switch to the latest 4.8 kernel
> available from either unstable or kernel.org, or compile the latest
> 4.4-longterm kernel from kernel.org.

Okay, I'm running 4.8.0.1-amd64 from unstable now. Fn-F1-F4 still don't
do anything.

> > Some of the function keys work (e.g., Fn-F5/F6 for brightness down/up),
> > but some do not (e.g., F1-F3 for volume control, and F4 for suspend
> > (suspend works fine out of the box via the Xfce suspend hooks)). Any
> > idea how to fix / troubleshoot this?
> 
> run xev, and check if you get X events.  If you do, you need to get xfce
> to handle these X events somehow (can't help you there).

I've done that, but I'll try some more and report back. I always have
trouble understanding and parsing xev output.

> If you don't see anything in xev, use the stuff in package input-utils
> to trace events in the thinkpad-acpi input device, and also on the main
> keyboard input device (lsinput, input-events).  That might help.
> 
> > I saw this:
> > 
> > http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_get_special_keys_to_work
> 
> It is somewhat outdated for the newer Lenovo models and Linux kernels, I
> believe.
> 
> > But the details are really not explained well - what are these masks,
> > what do they mean, and where are they documented?
> 
> You should not need to mess with those.  They are either correct
> out-of-the-box, or you need a newer kernel anyway for other reasons.
> 
> FWIW, they are documented in Documentation/laptops/thinkpad-acpi.txt in
> the kernel source:
> 
> http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/laptops/thinkpad-acpi.txt

Thanks for the help - when I composed my original message, I was hoping
you'd chime in ;)

Celejar