Fn-key

Created mandag 26 december 2016

Getting the Function-key to work took a little more work than I anticipated.
Out of the box monitor-off and wifi-off worked (sort of)

I was missing keyboard/screen-backlight, audio and touchpad controls.

The wifi-off worked somewhat.
It turns off the WIFI, but is unable to re-connect when re-enabled.

All of the key-presses was registered, and produced a xf86*-multimedia output.
Well.. all except keyboard-backlight which is caused by a bug (fix below)

This article will take help combine the xf86*-multimedia key-press with a function.

Screen Backlight

# There is a bug causing FN+F5/F6 not to produce any output at all.
# This can be resolved by adding acpi_osi= as a kernel module.

# Edit /etc/default/grub and add acpi_osi= to the end of CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
# Ex.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash elevator=bfq acpi_osi="

# Generate new grub.cfg
$ grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

# No further configuration is needed for the Screen-Backlight.

Xbindkeys

# Xbindkeys can be used to bind a key-press with a function.
# Xbindkeys reads its configuration from ~/.xbindkeysrc (Github)

# Install the Xbindkeys package
$ pacman -S xbindkeys

# To autostart Xbindkeys, add it to your xinitrc.

# To get valueable information about a key-press
$ xbindkey -k

# This will produce 3 lines. Ex.

# First line can be replaced with a command to run
# Second and Third line can be used as binding parameters.
# We just need one of the last two lines, and we'll be using the xf86* value.

# All of these definings will be added to our ~/.xbindkeysrc file.

Volume Controls

# Requires PulseAudio and Pulseaudio-ctl
# Toggle mute

"pulseaudio-ctl mute"
	XF86AudioMute

# Volume Up

"pulseaudio-ctl up"
	XF86AudioRaiseVolume

# Volume Down

"pulseaudio-ctl down"
	XF86AudioLowerVolume

Keyboard Backlight

# We wont get the full experience with 3 steps backlight strenght - rather a 1 setting on/off
# This is still preferable from the lousy asus-kbd-backlight package from AUR, which works for 5 min.
# Install the upower package (used by all major DE basically)
$ pacman -S upower

# Add these two snippets to the ~/.xbindkeysrc

"dbus-send --type=method_call --print-reply=literal --system --dest="org.freedesktop.UPower" /org/freedesktop/UPower/KbdBacklight org.freedesktop.UPower.KbdBacklight.SetBrightness int32:2"
	XF86KbdBrightnessUp

"dbus-send --type=method_call --print-reply=literal --system --dest="org.freedesktop.UPower" /org/freedesktop/UPower/KbdBacklight org.freedesktop.UPower.KbdBacklight.SetBrightness int32:0"
	XF86KbdBrightnessDown

Toggle Touchpad

# Touchpad Toggle script is found at Github.
# My location for this script would be ~/.dotfiles/.scripts/toggle_touchpad.sh
# Link to that script in the ~/.xbindkeysrc file.

	"~/dotfiles/scripts/toggle_touchpad.sh"
		XF86TouchpadToggle