New (aluminum) apple keyboard. FN key no workie.

[speedfreak_R34]

Hello everyone. Recently switched to Sabayon from Gentoo, loving it so far (some minor issues aside, which you may hear about later). I have a dilemma and I was wondering if anyone here has experienced this also.

Recently bought a new apple keyboard. Feels very nice, but the fn key (in place of insert on most keyboards) doesn't work. Tried getting a keycode with xev, combinations of the fn key and the f-keys and I get nothing. Did some looking around and found out that on most apple laptops the fn key sends hardware codes which there are programs to interpret those, but they require x86 (running x86-64) or they need to actually be running on a power/macbook (tried pommed, did this to me).

So...any ideas?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[WarraWarra]

If someone in gentoo do not have a fix for this I doubt we would have but there is a few Apple users here might try to PM them and they could seehow or what works on their's .
Search with top right of this page search option or try the wiki tehre might be something there similar that could help.

[speedfreak_R34]

Looked over the Gentoo forums for the same stuff. Nothing there. I'll see what the apple forum has. Only thing I can think of is finding something like pbbuttonsd that will read the fn key without having to check to see if it's running on apple hardware...

Thanks for the reply, though.

[speedfreak_R34]

Just something I decided to try real fast. Used cat to see input from keyboard. Apparently fn does send a signal (woohoo!), just don't know what.

[speedfreak_R34]

Back again. Fn key sends 464 as it's keycode. Which does not a d*mn thing for me since xkb only goes to 255... Also found out F13-F19 keys are 183-189 as keycodes.

Later all.

[speedfreak_R34]

Back again. Found a small program that someone wrote for keyboards that face this problem.

http://ulkoavaruus.de/index.php?doc=ibm_keyboard

Pretty much what I'm looking for, just not as clean of an workaround as I would like. I'm reading the code (they left some fairly detailed comments, which helps when you can't code at all) and i'll let you all know if it works.

By the way, my travels brought me past some LKML and xorg list posts, so this problem may be solved properly soon, or at least when I can code it will be solved.