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A lot of people say that Thinkpad Buttons prevents the CPU from saving power and shouldn't be used but it is the only solution for Thinkpads I know that shows OSD for volume keys. hotkey-setup that came with Ubuntu Jaunty can't even intercept those keys. Is there a better alternative, that is good enough with CPU sleeping states and can show OSD?

Gaff
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vava
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2 Answers2

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The modern equivalent is the HAL daemon, hald. When hald is running you can:

  1. Get or Set properites
  2. Find device objects by property matching or by capability matching
  3. List all the hal devices

Try:

lshal | grep input

or

hal-find-by-capability --capability input | xargs -n1 lshal -u

for a list of all the input devices & buttons known to hald

Update I'm using Gnome. If you're running KDE, you can try kcontrol. Refer to this HowTo - it's a bit dated. kcontrol is kde3, systemsettings in kde4. I think the nvram group setting are still applicable.

sleske
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DaveParillo
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  • sure but there's no OSD :) – vava Oct 24 '09 at 12:22
  • I'm currently running Ubuntu 9.04 on a T61p, my volume keys work and there is associated partially translucent OSD when adjusting the volume. Maybe I don't get you're question really. I haven't installed anything special to make this happen. – DaveParillo Oct 24 '09 at 16:19
  • My OSD looks like this: http://sites.google.com/site/daveparillo/downloads/superuser/volume-osd.png?attredirects=0 – DaveParillo Oct 24 '09 at 16:47
  • @DaveParillo, hm, no, I don't have any visual confirmation when I use volume button or any other special kind of button for that matter. I hope that upgrade to 9.10 will cure the problem then. – vava Oct 25 '09 at 08:07
  • Note that hald is no deprecated, and (mostly) replaced by `udev`. – sleske Aug 01 '14 at 07:39
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I don't have a ThinkPad to try these on, but googling for "thinkpad buttons linux" gave me these two promising links:
1. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_get_special_keys_to_work
2. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_Button

warren
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