[regression] Brightness hotkeys don't work anymore

[Mika Fischer]

Since a few days ago my brightness hotkeys don't work anymore. This has worked in gutsy and in hardy until very shortly.

I'm running current hardy on a Samsung Q45.

This is a very big problem since when running on battery, the brightness is set to the lowest level on boot and without a way to turn it up, the laptop is basically usesless!

I thought it might be a problem with the recent xserver-xorg-video-intel package but even reverting the change that switched the backlight control from legacy to combo did not help, so I suspect a change in the kernel...

[Mika Fischer (zoop)]

OK. While looking at my dmesg file I noticed some suspicious messages. After some more testing I can confirm that pressing my brightness hotkeys causes the following messages:

[ 2033.723082] atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x88 on isa0060/serio0).
[ 2033.723093] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e008 <keycode>' to make it known.
[ 2037.023545] atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x89 on isa0060/serio0).
[ 2037.023556] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e009 <keycode>' to make it known.

So, maybe the kernel recently learned to capture and interpret these hotkeys, but now does nothing with them.

I'd rather the kernel left the keys alone like before so they can continue to adjust the brightness.

Please, please fix this before release. It really makes Ubuntu unusable for me and everyone else having this problem...

[Sam Morris (yrro)]

I have the same problem. I believe that <keycode> are defined in ./usr/include/linux/input.h'. Can you run 'setkeycodes e008 225' and 'setkeycodes e008 224' and then press the buttons and see what happens?

On my system this silences the kernel messages, but does not cause the laptop brightness to actually change. However if I run 'lshal -m' while pressing them, I can see that HAL picks up the events... I guess it just does not know what to do with them. How about for you?

[Sam Morris (yrro)]

I booted the Hardy Beta livecd and the brightness keys don't work.

[Mika Fischer (zoop)]

For me it's

sudo setkeycodes e008 136
sudo setkeycodes e009 137

that silences the kernel. After that lshal -m sees the keypresses as:

09:11:00.004: platform_i8042_i8042_KBD_port_logicaldev_input condition ButtonPressed = find
09:11:00.316: platform_i8042_i8042_KBD_port_logicaldev_input condition ButtonPressed = cut

which probably is the real problem together with the fact that the keycodes are not enabled by default.

OTOH it seems that now almost all special keys have this behaviour, which means that they can be made to do the right thing in the future. Previously they just did nothing.

As a workaround I installed the xbacklight package and bound <Super>-B and <Super>-V to "xbacklight -inc 10" and "xbacklight -dec 10" respectively.

This bug is still highly inconvenient though...

[Sam Morris (yrro)]

Well, the keycodes will be set up by default once Ubuntu updates to the next release of hal-info. The next stage is to get HAL to perform some action when the brightnessup and brightnessdown keys are pressed... be that running xbacklight or something else.

[viterico (noquieroserdumas)]

In a Samsung R20 with Gutsy never had that problem... but with the beta of Hardy I can't change the brightness...

Xev say this:

KeyRelease event, serial 30, synthetic NO, window 0x2400001,
    root 0x87, subw 0x0, time 1824985, (555,136), root:(561,219),
    state 0x0, keycode 101 (keysym 0x1008ff4d, XF86LaunchD), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 30, synthetic NO, window 0x2400001,
    root 0x87, subw 0x0, time 1825502, (555,136), root:(561,219),
    state 0x0, keycode 212 (keysym 0x1008ff4e, XF86LaunchE), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

but never change when I use the Fn and the brightness keys...

I hope this problem might be solutionated.
Thanks!

[Mika Fischer (zoop)]

I think in my case this might actually be the result of a BIOS update. So it's not really a regression. It's still annoying though :)

[Marek Kubica (leonidas)]

Mika Fischer, you might have run into the same problem as in #146710, see my first comment. There seem to be various amounts of breakage: brightness not working via Fn-keys, various other Fn-keys not working, backlight modification not working at all. Do I understand you right? You updated the BIOS (just like me) and it stopped working?