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sczsne

Member

Registered: 2021-10-04

Posts: 10

[SOLVED]how are ACPI events handled by default? Some work, some don't.

An open ended question, but I will try to be precise here.

My situation is: I want to make all the ACPI events/special keys/buttons work on my thinkpad. What is confusing me is that some have behaviors, some don't. For instance. keyboard backlight, WiFi toggle, sleep, power, & shutting the lid all work about as expected.

However: the volume keys, mic mute, screen brightness, etc do NOT work as expected.

The most confusing part of this is that, when I toggle mute status on the speakers or the mic using pulseaudio, the corresponding indicator LED on the laptop responds. This is what is confusing to me, it knows the right LED, but apparently not the actual button that the LED is on.

I have read the wiki page for acpid, and believe I can figure it out, but because some of these ACPI-related behaviors are working and some aren't, I didn't want to start w/o understanding what it's already doing. I don't want to create responses to these events that are going to be fighting with whatever behavior is already present.

Hope I make sense! Thx for reading.

[EDIT]
OK, so I now have enough information to answer my own question! ACPI events like as the power button, lid close, and the sleep button are handled by logind.
as for the rest, I am using xbindkeys to associate commands with key codes I figured out using xev

Last edited by sczsne (2022-01-30 08:48:04)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,296

Re: [SOLVED]how are ACPI events handled by default? Some work, some don't.

What clients do you have configured that would be handling these events? If you want to figure out whether the button as a button generates a relevant keypress you can use xev from xorg-xev or

libinput debug-events

. All of the ones you mention as working are not tied to any particular client and have a "global" effect. The others need "something" that catches them and then does a relevant action.