Arch Linux

blixawillbargeld

Member

Registered: 2008-01-22

Posts: 39

Thinkpad L380 - Swap FN & Ctrl Key

Hello,

I got a new Thinkpad and want to swap the FN and the left Ctrl Key. There is a BIOS option to do this, but unfortunately it is not working. Not sure where the problem is, I don´t want to do a workaround with xmodmap when it should work out of the box with the BIOS option.

[XXX@XXX ~]$ localectl                                               
   System Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
       VC Keymap: de
      X11 Layout: de
       X11 Model: thinkpad
     X11 Variant: nodeadkeys

Also tried it with the pc105 keyboard layout.

Any ideas how to get the BIOS option working? Hope its not a stupid question.

Greetings
Stefan

asdplayer

Member

Registered: 2015-02-18

Posts: 6

Re: Thinkpad L380 - Swap FN & Ctrl Key

May not be very helpful.
By my experience, I learned that my Asus FN key behavior is not configurable by the OS, and I believe this to be true for every other manufacturer's keyboards.
By this I mean that FN + key combinations generate hardwired scancodes, which cannot be changed by the OS (specifically, I wanted to assign functions FN+F3 and FN+F4, which by default have no assigned function, but this is not possible, because they do not generate any scancode); one can only change the function assigned to a pre-existing FN+key combination.
For example, when mapping custom keycodes to keysyms as I did once, I found that the only configurable combinations are those with Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Meta (by the way, this allowed me to do weird things like assigning different funtions to FN+F7, Shift+FN+F7, etc..., because my keyboard generates a scancode for FN+F7).
You can find further knowledge here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ex … board_keys (although I think you already read that page).
I would suggest you to update your BIOS/firmware to the latest version, but again I think you already did that.
I think your hardware is quite new, maybe its firmware has an issue. You should try to contact Lenovo to get help from them (and possibly, and most importantly, get them to fix the firmware, if this is the case).

blixawillbargeld

Member

Registered: 2008-01-22

Posts: 39

Re: Thinkpad L380 - Swap FN & Ctrl Key

Thanks for your answer. You are right, I already updated the BIOS without success. I also found, that the FN Key is not configurable by the OS, so it´s a BIOS matter. I just wonder if it works under Windows or not. Else I have to hope for the next BIOS update. It just screws all my "used to" shortcuts, wich gives a bad user experience. Else the laptop is perfect :-)