After puzzling for quite a while on how to get the Fn keys working on a Macbook Pro (4,1) in Linux (they work fine in Mac OS X, of course), I came across a forum thread today that presented a very promising solution.
Traditionally, the problem with the Fn-keys of the Feb ‘08 edition of the MBPs was that they simply didn’t work. Not even with pommed.
The issue seemed to be an erroneous hardware ID listing in hid-quirks.c, under drivers/hid/usbhid/, where the Device ID for the keyboard was listed as 0×021b instead of the proper 0×0230, as shown when doing an lsusb. (More details in this bug report.)
The fix in the forum post describes how to dynamically load the usbhid module, with the proper Device ID passed to it as a parameter.
Thanks loads to _alex_ and his wonderfully elegant solution, described below:
The fix described is for an Ubuntu system, but there’s no reason why the concept wouldn’t work on any other distro.
- Edit /etc/modprobe.d/options
- Add the line below at the end of the file:
- For Macbook Air users, _alex_ recommends this line:
options usbhid quirks=0x05ac:0x0230:0x00000800,0x05ac:0x0231:0x00004800,0x05ac:0x0232:0x00000800
options usbhid quirks=0x05ac:0x0223:0x00000800,0x05ac:0x0224:0x00004800,0x05ac:0x0225:0x00000800
Following the changes, you should be able to restart your machine and have your Fn-keys working, no additional configuration required. On Ubuntu, the screen brightness keys (F1 and F2) and the volume keys (F10, F11 and F12) and the Eject key (beside F12) work fine.
Filed under: linux | Leave a Comment
Tags: apple, brightness, fn, keyboard, macbook pro, penryn, volume
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