Comment 0 for bug 217504

There are popping quite a lot "hotkeys don't work anymore" bugs up and it boils down to certain acpi_fakekey keycodes being ignored/filtered out.

acpi_fakekey is shipped from the package acpi-support, and it basically takes a keycode and sends it to the keyboard fd.

E.g. "sudo acpi_fakekey 81" works and simulates pressing "3".

The problem however is, that keycodes like KEY_WWW do not seem to get through (e.g. a running "xev" does not receive any event, when using sleep, acpi_fakekey and putting focus in the xev window).

This causes the hooks provided by acpi-support to do nothing, e.g. the following should open a browser window, but does nothing:

$ cat /etc/acpi/webbtn.sh
#!/bin/bash
. /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants
acpi_fakekey $KEY_WWW

$ grep KEY_WWW /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants
KEY_WWW=150

$ sudo acpi_fakekey 150

TESTCASE:
1. start "xev" (from x11-utils) in a shell/terminal
2. arrange the xev window and terminal so that you can see events from xev in the shell window
3. in another shell execute "sleep 10; sudo acpi_fakekey 148"
4. Move the mouse cursor/focus in the xev window
5. Check if a KeyPress and KeyRelease gets displayed when the acpi_fakekey gets executed

Joey Chan wrote in bug 199502:
Bug is actually in the kernel.
acpi-support is a collection of scripts, acpi-fakekey works in 2.6.22
I also ran Xorg7.4/1.3 on 2.6.22, fakekey still works.

It's only when changing to 2.6.24 does it break. I don't think the
problem is X ignoring the event, but the kernel actually dropping the
fake input. Looking at the source, there aren't any X components linked
in.