Arch Linux

CyberNhull

Member

Registered: 2013-01-27

Posts: 99

Samsung NP550PC-S03 FN keys always active in FN mode

Hello people. Yesterday i switch from Plasma to Gnome to see what's up with him and i notice after a short while that mine FN keys are always active. If i press F2 without pressing FN the brightness goes down and it's the same thing for sound,wireless on/off,touchpad on/off,etc. I looked on the net but i only found solutions if the FN key didn't work.

On Plasma this happen too but after hours, on gnome it was like 10/15m after i started it. Rebooting fixes the problem for more 10/15m.
Anyone know a more permanent solution? Thanks in advance.

EDIT: I tried to use showkey -a to see if FN and F1,F2,etc appeared but they don't.

EDIT2: After 3 hours on Plasma 5.7 the same thing happens.

Last edited by CyberNhull (2016-08-30 13:03:31)

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If it does not kill you....It will make you smarter

SmallAndSimple

Member

Registered: 2015-11-25

Posts: 50

Re: Samsung NP550PC-S03 FN keys always active in FN mode

I do not really understand the behaviour right now: you are saying that FN mode is always active? So if you press the FN key then F2 controls brightness and also if you do not press FN, F2 also controls brightness?

Usually the FN thingy is controlled by the BIOS (or UEFI), so the keyboard hardware reports a different button to the OS if the FN+F2 combo is pressed versus only F2 being pressed. The FN key itself is usually not reported to the OS, so I expect Arch not to notice an FN keypress. It is weird that F1, F2 etc are also not reported to the OS. I would advice you to take a look at your BIOS settings, maybe you see something important there.

CyberNhull

Member

Registered: 2013-01-27

Posts: 99

Re: Samsung NP550PC-S03 FN keys always active in FN mode

I do not really understand the behaviour right now: you are saying that FN mode is always active? So if you press the FN key then F2 controls brightness and also if you do not press FN, F2 also controls brightness?.

Yes, that's right.

Usually the FN thingy is controlled by the BIOS (or UEFI), so the keyboard hardware reports a different button to the OS if the FN+F2 combo is pressed versus only F2 being pressed. The FN key itself is usually not reported to the OS, so I expect Arch not to notice an FN keypress. It is weird that F1, F2 etc are also not reported to the OS. I would advice you to take a look at your BIOS settings, maybe you see something important there

Didn't really see anything related to this problem. This happens to me in KDE too but usually after almost a day of having the laptop on. On Gnome is after 10/15m.

Can this be a problem/bug of libinput or evdev?

Last edited by CyberNhull (2016-08-28 11:26:01)

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If it does not kill you....It will make you smarter