KDE 5 Notebook Asus UX305CA Fn Keys

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1

Hello

I have a new Notebook for work. I have installed Tumbleweed because of the new kernel. Otherwise the touch pad would not work.

But I have some problems configuring the Fn buttons for it. I have one for disabling the touch pad and I also found the dialogue (toggle touch pad) where I can use specific settings. But when I press Fn + F9 it switches back to standard. So its the default configuration I guess.
But I can only disable it. Once disabled it cannot be enabled again with this shortcut. Reboot is the only option so far.

And the function of the other Fn shortcuts is also strange. Screen brightness does not work at all. Only the shortcuts for the volume are working perfectly.

Any ideas what I could try?

Thank you very much

2

Adding "acpi_osi= " (including the trailing blank) to the boot command line usually helps with ASUS, unless yours has an unusual BIOS setup.
To try out, just press “E” at the boot menu and add the above to the “linuxefi” line, then F10 to boot.
You can make it permanent in YaST2-Bootloader, boot options tab.

3

Thank you very much bruno,

Had no luck with this trick.
Before I applied the line I was able to reduce the brightness with the slider in the energy options. The fn keys were not working.

After applying the line I get the osi symbol on the screen when using the fn keys but the brightness isn’t changing.

Maybe someday there will be a fix for it.

4

These “hot keys” or whatever you want to call them which typically run across the top row of a keyboard are typically problematic because their functionality is based on the manufacturer volunteering to submit a mapping file to the kernel upstream. I haven’t looked at or for this in many years, but IIRC it’s somewhere hanging off the very end of the /proc tree, if you can locate the directory you can inspect the various text files submitted by different manufacturers.

So, it seems in general that laptop manufacturers have to have considerable interest in the Linux community to even be aware that they need to create and submit something for their hardware to work with the Linux kernel (I own an HP and HP has a pretty good record of doing this, but with some bugginess over the years. I won’t go into my own history with these sometimes essential keys in various running environments). I don’t know if this might be the only Microsoft WMI technology that’s in the Linux kernel, but that’s the standard language and interface all hardware manufacturers use to support these keys…

That said, it looks like someone created an ArchWiki article who owns an ASUS laptop (likely M series) so he included his own findings specific to his laptop in the article
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/extra_keyboard_keys

TSU

5

Thank you very much for your reply. Very kind of you.

I did some investigations and the best two links I found so far are

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ASUS_Zenbook_UX305

where everything related to the notebook is listed.

Seems that it’s a problem which should be fixed by the intel developer team. But there is not a lot going on as the bug is more than 2 years old.
But this is a different revision of the notebook mentioned there.

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98931

Maybe I can provide some information there to get it fixed.

Thanks for for you help anyway

6

Hi
Did you try the acpi_osi="!Windows 2012" boot option?

If it’s not working and since it’s a different model, I would look at raising an openSUSE bug. Install dmidecode and evtest and attach the output;
openSUSE:Submitting bug reports - openSUSE

7

Thank you very much for your reply. Actually it’s not working. Seems to be a different model of notebook.

I installed both tools. The first one is self explanatory. But evtest seems not working right. I have found an manual in the ubuntu wiki

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingTouchpadDetection/evtest


linux-79we:/home/user # evtest
No device specified, trying to scan all of /dev/input/event*
Available devices:
/dev/input/event0:      AT Translated Set 2 keyboard
/dev/input/event1:      Lid Switch
/dev/input/event2:      Sleep Button
/dev/input/event3:      Power Button
/dev/input/event4:      Video Bus
/dev/input/event5:      Asus Wireless Radio Control
/dev/input/event6:      PC Speaker
/dev/input/event7:      HDA Intel PCH Headphone
/dev/input/event8:      HDA Intel PCH HDMI/DP,pcm=3
/dev/input/event9:      HDA Intel PCH HDMI/DP,pcm=7
/dev/input/event10:     HDA Intel PCH HDMI/DP,pcm=8
/dev/input/event11:     Elan Touchpad
/dev/input/event12:     USB2.0 UVC HD Webcam
Select the device event number [0-12]: 4
Input driver version is 1.0.1
Input device ID: bus 0x19 vendor 0x0 product 0x6 version 0x0
Input device name: "Video Bus"
Supported events:
  Event type 0 (EV_SYN)
  Event type 1 (EV_KEY)
    Event code 224 (KEY_BRIGHTNESSDOWN)
    Event code 225 (KEY_BRIGHTNESSUP)
    Event code 227 (KEY_SWITCHVIDEOMODE)
    Event code 241 (KEY_VIDEO_NEXT)
    Event code 242 (KEY_VIDEO_PREV)
    Event code 243 (KEY_BRIGHTNESS_CYCLE)
    Event code 244 (KEY_BRIGHTNESS_ZERO)
    Event code 245 (KEY_DISPLAY_OFF)
Properties:
Testing ... (interrupt to exit)
^15~^X@sp^X@sp^X@sp^X@sp^X@sp^X@sp

This is what I get. As far as I understand I have to choose the different events and then I have to press the corresponding button.
As listed above there is no event for brightness control.

Thank you very much