Special keys - how to? [Thinkpad X61]

[flyingfishfinger]

Hi,
Noob alert. I'm looking to get the special keys to work on my Thinkpad X61. Sound works fine with Alsa and Alsamixer.
Things I'm missing are Volume / Mute buttons, screen brightness, Thinklight, Wifi keys.
I've installed Thinkpad-acpi (this should make them work afaik) as onboot, but it doesn't seem to have any effect.
Any ideas?
Thanks,

Rafael

[dentonlt]

'Special' keys may need to be caught and manually linked to alsa/brightness. I'm on an Acer c720 with similar challenge.

Try using xev to catch/identify key press/release codes. Then use actkbd (or something like that) to call your own volume/brightness control scripts on keypress/release.

HTH

Sent from my HTC_0P6B6 using Tapatalk

[curaga]

I used actkbd on a Macbook Pro to bind the brightness and volume keys. Note that xev keycodes may be different than the ones seen by actkbd, so actkbd's own detection should be used instead.

[dentonlt]

... so actkbd's own detection should be used instead.

Totally forgot about that. I do remember locking up my computer once or more, though. Be sure you know your hard reset options ...



Sent from my HTC_0P6B6 using Tapatalk

[flyingfishfinger]

So with acpid I can see the volume / mute events, but not the backlight key or Thinklight events. For the ones that work, I haven't defined any rules. On the other hand, in dmesg I can see that thinkpad-acpi loads in dmesg, but defers to the built-in modules to the tune of: "This Thinkpad has standard ACPI brightness control, supported by the ACPI video driver" and "input: Thinkpad Extra buttons as /devices/platform/thinkpad_acpi/input/input7".
Also, actkbd doesn't seem to detect any of the special keys at all...
Not a whole lot of that means much to me, any clarification would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks a bunch!

R

UPDATE: Installing graphics-3.16.6-tinycore64 made the brightness hotkeys work (while trying to fix resolution). Yay! Still no volume keys.

[curaga]

Did you use the thinkpad extra device for actkbd, instead of the keyboard device?