Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/kubuntu-laptop-buttons

• Created: 2006-06-06 by JonathanRiddell

• Contributors: JonathanRiddell, LukaRenko, JonathanJesse

• Packages affected: kmilo, amarok, konqueror

Summary

Use the Ubuntu laptop buttons infrastructure in KDE.

Rationale

Many laptops and also desktops have extra feature buttons which handle power management, display controls and other features. These should work as well in Kubuntu as they do in Ubuntu.

Use cases

Masie has a laptop with suspend and brightness buttons, when pressing these buttons nothing happens and she doesn't know how to make them work.

Bob notices that all his laptop buttons work in Ubuntu but none of them work in Kubuntu which would otherwise be his preferred environment.

Daniel follows the complex kmilo thinkpad instructions to get his thinkpad buttons working, he has to enable nvram writing to get this to work but wonders if it is a security risk.

Scope

Specific laptops are the problem of acpi-support and hotkey-setup, this spec is for making sure KDE does the right thing with the output of hotkey-setup.

Design

KDE has KMilo, a kde daemon module for handling laptop keys. KMilo has plugins for different types of laptop and each plugin for KMilo works in different ways and has different abilities. With the abstraction provided by hotkey-setup we no longer need different parts of KMilo for each laptop. We will create a new KMilo plugin for hotkey-support.

Implementation

Our KMilo hotkey-setup plugin will run xmodmap on startup to map the xevents from hotkey-setup to X keys. We will setup global bindings in KMix, Konqueror, Amarok and KubuntuPowerManagement to handle volume up/down, play/pause, suspend/hibernate, screen brightness and web browser control. The KMilo plugin will also have global bindings for volume and screen brightness and will show its on screen display to give feedback to the user, it will get its values by querying KMix and KubuntuPowerManagement with DCOP.

The KMilo plugin will also have global keybindings to listen for the e-mail and web browser buttons, these will run the default application which the user can set in the normal KDE way. Other application buttons will run the default Kubuntu application.

The existing KMilo plugins will be moved to a new unsupported package.

Unspecified buttons such as the "IBM Thinkpad" button will be mapped to X keys which can be set to almost any action using khotkeys, a standard part of KDE.

Comments

AchimBohnet

• Lots of applications have Favorites, Stop, Forward, Back etc functionality. The special keys should not be globally assigned to just one app. Instead we should modify the keybindings of the apps where assignment of XF86<action> makes sense. I assume, that at least some of the XF86<*> keysyms can be assgined as a second Keybinding to a KDE STDAccel and are then automaticaly available in all apps that make use of them.

• Full screen mode: check that globally bound keys work also in full screen mode. I once used a tool (not kmilo) where e.g. Mute, etc. didn't work in full screen mode.