#1 Today 14:38:17

jimjamz

Member

From: Nagasaki, Japan

Registered: 2016-04-04

Posts: 191

Packages for laptop function keys

I'm currently experimenting with another Linux distribution and am interested look back at how BunsenLabs managed to provide some of the functionality for the typical laptop function keys (e.g. volume up/down/mute, brightness up/down, mute/unmute mic, disable/enable camera, disable/enable bluetooth etc.).  More importantly, I'm interested in the package(s) that enable the aforementioned features.

I'm experimenting with various power monitors (e.g. tlp, fdpowermon) and power managers (e.g. powerkit) and  I already have those configured as well as the ACPI packages available to my non-Debian distribution, but these alone have not enabled the laptop function keys I've been accustomed to in BunsenLabs.  Are there specific packages the enable this, or is it a combination of different packages and their configurations that enable the entire function key set?
Is it achieved with the xfce4-power-manager package?
I'm aware that those key features may simply be inherited from Debian, but if so, I'd like to know which packages were used for it.

I could achieve this in other ways, for example, through using xbindkeys and mapping amixer and brightnessctl keybindings to `XF86` commands, but I'd rather know how it was done in BunsenLabs.

Last edited by jimjamz (Today 14:52:33)

hhh

Hercule Poirot

From: Belgium

Registered: 2015-09-17

Posts: 17,571

Website

Re: Packages for laptop function keys

Of course, it's different for X11 than Wayland, and we even changed how we handled volume between boron and carbon when we switched from tint2 to xfce4-panel, if I recall correctly.

Keyboard volume controls on Carbon (X11) are provided via the xfce4-panel plugin "xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin"...
https://packages.debian.org/trixie/xfce … dio-plugin

In the plugin's preferences on the 'General' tab you'll see a checkbox to "Enable keyboard shortcuts for volume control".

Brightness shortcuts work in Carbon because of xfce4-power-manager (again, IIRC).
If you wait for @johnraff to post from Japan, he'll be able to confirm or deny my answers. 'xfce4-power-manager -c'>General>Buttons>Handle display brightness keys (option not available in Wayland).

See the Arch Wiki for more info...
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xbindk … io_control
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xbindk … ht_control

For brightness keybinds on Wayland (and X11), light is mostly used outside of GNOME, KDE and Xfce, but how it's bound to keys depends on the compositor. Even on X11, it would help to know some specifics like what window manager you're using.

Last edited by hhh (Today 15:30:20)

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