27 Nov
2024
27 Nov
'24
10:53 p.m.
On my Thinkpad T580 laptop, the Fn+F5 and Fn+F6 shortcut keys manually
control screen brightness. These shortcuts function as expected with KDE
and Xfce but not TDE. No special configuration is needed.
I find nothing that helps in kcontrol or tdepowersave. I found a thread
in this list discussing the issue but with no simple solution.
What is needed to have TDE support these shortcuts to "just work" like
with KDE and Xfce?
Thanks.
27 Nov
27 Nov
11:36 p.m.
On 11/27/24 2:53 PM, Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
On my Thinkpad T580 laptop, the Fn+F5 and Fn+F6
shortcut keys manually
control screen brightness. These shortcuts function as expected with KDE and
Xfce but not TDE. No special configuration is needed.
I find nothing that helps in kcontrol or tdepowersave. I found a thread in
this list discussing the issue but with no simple solution.
What is needed to have TDE support these shortcuts to "just work" like with
KDE and Xfce?
What distro?
I assume you have kmilo-trinity installed.
Did you try kmilo-legacy-trinity?
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28 Nov
28 Nov
7:22 p.m.
On 11/27/24 5:37 PM, deloptes via tde-users wrote:
Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
That helped some. Looks like the problem is incomplete support for the
T580 model. On my T400 Thinkpad the brightness keys are Fn+Home|End. On
the T580 the keys are Fn+F5|F6. The brightness keys on the T400 function
fine.
Some special keys on the T580 function, such as sound volume and suspend
to ram.
I browsed the tdeutils/kmilo code but did not find anything obvious with
how Fn keys are mapped or detected on Thinkpads.
What is needed to have TDE support these
shortcuts to "just work" like
with KDE and Xfce?
I think you may need kmilo-trinity 
8:25 p.m.
On Thu, 28 Nov 2024 13:22:30 -0600
Darrell Anderson via tde-users <users(a)trinitydesktop.org> wrote:
I browsed the tdeutils/kmilo code but did not find
anything obvious with
how Fn keys are mapped or detected on Thinkpads.
If I'm reading the code correctly, it isn't detecting your key presses
per se at all.
If you fish through the READMEs, it looks like kmilo's Thinkpad
support was at least in part carried over from an application called tpb
( http://www.nongnu.org/tpb/ ), whose developers reverse-engineered
what the extended keys were doing by observing nvram. kmilo seems to
be using offsets and bitmasks hard-coded into the
ThinkPadMonitor::getNvramState function in kmilo/thinkpad/thinkpad.cpp
to determine what the nvram contents mean.
I think there are instructions somewhere on the tpb site for monitoring
nvram. That seems to be what you would have to do to derive a new
set of magic numbers that work with your T580.
It's a weird and brittle system, and to be honest, I'm surprised it works
at all on modern hardware.
E. Liddell
8:46 p.m.
Anno domini 2024 Thu, 28 Nov 15:25:35 -0500
E. Liddell via tde-users scripsit:
On Thu, 28 Nov 2024 13:22:30 -0600
Darrell Anderson via tde-users <users(a)trinitydesktop.org> wrote:
It's not that bad. The brightness keys are handled by ACPI, so when you have installed
acpid you can just run
$ acpi_listen
and the you get something like:
video/brightnessdown BRTDN 00000087 00000000
video/brightnessdown BRTDN 00000087 00000000
video/brightnessup BRTUP 00000086 00000000
video/brightnessup BRTUP 00000086 00000000
video/brightnessup BRTUP 00000086 00000000
... hm ... mybe you are missing acpid?
Nik
I browsed the tdeutils/kmilo code but did not
find anything obvious with
how Fn keys are mapped or detected on Thinkpads.
If I'm reading the code correctly, it isn't detecting your key presses
per se at all.
If you fish through the READMEs, it looks like kmilo's Thinkpad
support was at least in part carried over from an application called tpb
( http://www.nongnu.org/tpb/ ), whose developers reverse-engineered
what the extended keys were doing by observing nvram. kmilo seems to
be using offsets and bitmasks hard-coded into the
ThinkPadMonitor::getNvramState function in kmilo/thinkpad/thinkpad.cpp
to determine what the nvram contents mean.
I think there are instructions somewhere on the tpb site for monitoring
nvram. That seems to be what you would have to do to derive a new
set of magic numbers that work with your T580.
It's a weird and brittle system, and to be honest, I'm surprised it works
at all on modern hardware.
E. Liddell
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9:30 p.m.
On 11/28/24 2:46 PM, Dr. Nikolaus Klepp via tde-users wrote:
It's not that bad. The brightness keys are handled
by ACPI, so when you have installed acpid you can just run
$ acpi_listen
and the you get something like:
video/brightnessdown BRTDN 00000087 00000000
video/brightnessdown BRTDN 00000087 00000000
video/brightnessup BRTUP 00000086 00000000
video/brightnessup BRTUP 00000086 00000000
video/brightnessup BRTUP 00000086 00000000
... hm ... mybe you are missing acpid?
The acpi daemon is installed and running, but the proverbial plot thickens.
The T580 Fn+F5|F6 keys return:
video/brightnessup BRTUP 00000086 00000000
video/brightnessdown BRTDN 00000087 00000000
The T400 Fn+Home|End keys return:
video/brightnessup BRTUP 00000086 00000000
video/brightnessdown BRTDN 00000087 00000000
Seems the mapping is the same on both laptops. Yet the T580 keys fail
with TDE.
29 Nov
29 Nov
3:01 a.m.
On 2024/11/29 06:30 AM, Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
Seems the mapping is the same on both laptops. Yet the T580 keys fail with TDE.
Hi Darrell,
simple (dumb) question: is kmilo service "running"? it can be started/stopped
from the service manager, so worth
checking if it is not running on one of the desktops.
Cheers
Michele
28 Nov
28 Nov
9:15 p.m.
On 11/28/24 2:25 PM, E. Liddell via tde-users wrote:
On Thu, 28 Nov 2024 13:22:30 -0600
Darrell Anderson via tde-users <users(a)trinitydesktop.org> wrote:
I looked at kmilo/thinkpad/README. As mentioned, the text implies that
Thinkpad special key mappings are stored in the hardware nvram, of which
the /dev/nvram device node is used to read the contents.
On my (Slackware) system the default permissions for /dev/nvram is 0600.
TDE kmilo/thinkpad code is designed to expect full read permissions and
prefers write permissions for certain functions. Yet these expectations
do not seem required for KDE or Xfce. My wild guess is those read/write
limitations should be removed from TDE code.
TDE reads some T580 special keys correctly but not the brightness keys
and reads the T400 brightness keys just fine. My guess is the hardcoding
method in kmilo/thinkpad/thinkpad.cpp (thinkpad_state->brightness_level
and thinkpad_state->brightness_toggle) is presuming only the old style
Thinkpad key mappings of Fn+Home|End.
I'm guessing with KDE and Xfce the code interrogates nvram to discover
the mappings. The old way used in TDE code doesn't do this.
A paper cut bug but most of us know the old proverb about paper cuts. :(
I browsed the tdeutils/kmilo code but did not
find anything obvious with
how Fn keys are mapped or detected on Thinkpads.
If I'm reading the code correctly, it isn't detecting your key presses
per se at all.
If you fish through the READMEs, it looks like kmilo's Thinkpad
support was at least in part carried over from an application called tpb
( http://www.nongnu.org/tpb/ ), whose developers reverse-engineered
what the extended keys were doing by observing nvram. kmilo seems to
be using offsets and bitmasks hard-coded into the
ThinkPadMonitor::getNvramState function in kmilo/thinkpad/thinkpad.cpp
to determine what the nvram contents mean.
I think there are instructions somewhere on the tpb site for monitoring
nvram. That seems to be what you would have to do to derive a new
set of magic numbers that work with your T580.
It's a weird and brittle system, and to be honest, I'm surprised it works
at all on modern hardware.
29 Nov
29 Nov
1:02 p.m.
On Thu, 28 Nov 2024 15:15:01 -0600
Darrell Anderson via tde-users <users(a)trinitydesktop.org> wrote:
I'm guessing with KDE and Xfce the code
interrogates nvram to discover
the mappings. The old way used in TDE code doesn't do this.
Actually, my bet would be that the other DEs are using something like
the ACPI monitoring method Nik suggested. To my eye, the code here
has all the hallmarks of a hack that was put in because, in 2004, better
methods either didn't exist or couldn't be guaranteed to work on most
hardware (since devices from the 1990s that didn't support ACPI were
still in use).
A commit message from the KDE repository in 2008 notes:
"removing to unmaintained/4: ksim, kmilo, klaptopdaemon
Noone has been interested to care for this codebase for some time,
a public call for maintainer did not change this."
Thereafter, kmilo doesn't appear in the tree for any KDE release
milestone. They probably rewrote their support for extended
laptop keys from scratch.
E. Liddell
23
days inactive
25
days old
10 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
Dan Youngquist -
Darrell Anderson -
deloptes -
Dr. Nikolaus Klepp -
E. Liddell -
Michele Calgaro