Can I change the Fn-behaviour without using BIOS?

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1

Hi everyone,
my laptop is getting old and after I had massive keyboard issues, I removed the more and more inflating battery.
Unfortunately now, whenever I disconnect the Laptop from a powersource my BIOS settings, including my preference for Fn-keys, reset. I prefer to have them as Fn keys on default, not as multimedia keys.
Would anyone know a way to circumvent going through the BIOS with every reboot now? I’d really appreciate it! :slight_smile:

If you need more info, I’ll gladly provide it.
Best regards,
gibbosus

PS: My keyboard doesn’t seem to have a Fn-lock combo (such as Fn+Esc or Fn+Shift). There is no lock symbol and I went through a lot of combinations to try.

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Depending on how old your laptop is, you may need to change the CMOS battery as well. The CMOS battery maintains the real time clock and any BIOS settings.

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Okay, that’s a good point, thank you!
But is it circumstancial then, that it became a problem, when I removed the main battery or can it support the CMOS battery, when it is depleted? Because the BIOS started resetting just when I removed the battery.

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Some laptops don’t have a separate CMOS battery, and power the CMOS from the main battery, for example Reddit - The heart of the internet

5

I guess you could use something like Input Remapper for this. For example, if your BIOS defaults to having F9 as “Volume Up”, and you have to press Fn+F9 to get the ‘real’ F9, then create two mappings:

F9 → Volume Up
Volume Up → F9

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6

I just had a look and yes - it doesn’t have a CMOS battery.

And I am trying to setup the Input Remapper, but it doesn’t seem to recognize the Media Keys, so I can’t remap them {:

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The documentation suggests it should, but I haven’t used it myself so I’m not sure of the nuances.

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I’ve tried around a lot now, but it really seems, that I can only map the media keys onto other keys but not vice versa. It doesn’t record the key being pressed. That’s also true, when I change them in BIOS (where I then use Fn+F8 for Volume up).

Still thanks a lot (: I think I will have to get used to change it in BIOS on boot.

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Ah, I see, it could be something like this: Key Mapper can't map brightness keys · Issue #27 · sezanzeb/input-remapper · GitHub

I notice that on my system, if I do sudo evtest and choose my keyboard as the device, I don’t see events for the media keys. I have to choose a different device with “Consumer Control” in the name to see those.

So this could be related - maybe Input Mapper isn’t “listening” to the device that fires the media key events so it can’t remap them.

Sorry about that :slightly_frowning_face:

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Actually, for me it is appearing in evtest. But Fn+F2 gives the same signal as Fn+F3 (Brightness Up). Some of the other media keys appear with the correct key code (eg. , KEY_VOLUME_UP, KEY_VOLUME_DOWN) and some just don’t show up at all.
And key mapper seems to also recognize it, because in debug it gives an error when pressing it: assertion ‘WIDGET_REALIZED_FOR_EVENT (widget, event)’ failed
I will open an issue.

Thanks for helping me figure out! :slight_smile:

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