use the source luke

Yes! Finally Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) recognizes the FN keys + F5 and F6 on my Sony Vaio AR71S. This has been annoying me ever since the Intrepid release. It still doesn’t work right out of the box because you need to add sony-brightness-up and sony-brightness-down in /etc/acpi/events, but it’s no big deal as long as the key events are recognized.

To get the key events just use acpi_listen and press down FN+F5, it will output something like this:

sony/hotkey SNC 00000001 00000010 (key combo pressed)
sony/hotkey SNC 00000001 0000003b (key combo released)


And when pressing FN+F6 we get this:

sony/hotkey SNC 00000001 00000011 (key combo pressed)
sony/hotkey SNC 00000001 0000003b (key combo released)


These events we’ll put in sony-brightness-up/down and my down script looks like this:

event=sony/hotkey SNC 00000001 00000010
action=/usr/bin/nvclock -S -12


I’m using nvclock because when using smartdimmer the intervals where just to low when dimming. I put a interval in nvclock of -12 which is reasonable. That’s it!