Hello,

I have been using Gnome, on openSUSE 11.4, for a while now, and it works without problems on my Thinkpad T60. However, I am not a fan of what I have seen of Gnome 3, and so I thought I would give KDE a try. I like it, and there are some great applications I use in gnome already, so switching looks tempting.

I installed the KDE(4.6.9) pattern from software management, and now I can log in on to the KDE desktop environment as well as Gnome. A couple of thinkpad specific things don't work however. Some of the thinkpad hotkeys don't work, but not all. In particular the Fn+F12 (hibernate) and the audio controls on the arrows. Pressing these combinations has no result, but the display brightness buttons (Fn+Home, +End), the radio switch, sleep all work. The keyboard is set to IBM Thinkpad R60/T60 etc in 'keyboard settings'. Running xev from console shows KDE recognises the key presses, and even that they are registered as having the function they are intended to.

Here is the xev output for Fn+12:

Code: Select all


KeyPress event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x5e00001,
    root 0x157, subw 0x5e00002, time 8771089, (47,22), root:(49,45),
    state 0x10, keycode 213 (keysym 0x1008ffa7, XF86Suspend), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x5e00001,
    root 0x157, subw 0x5e00002, time 8771089, (47,22), root:(49,45),
    state 0x10, keycode 213 (keysym 0x1008ffa7, XF86Suspend), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False



I thought that this might be a keyboard shortcut settings issue. In System Settings -> Shortcuts and Gestrures -> Global Shortcuts the 'KDE Daemon' shortcuts has Hibernate listed with the global shortcut. If I change that setting from the default, and enter Fn+F12 as the 'new' shortcut then the computer will hibernate. However, it does not save this across sessions. After logging out and logging back in the key won't respond again. I have tried setting a different key combination, Ctrl+F12, and again it worked in the session, but the change was not saved. After logging back in it had reset to the unresponsive default.

The audio controls I can probably live without, but the lack of a shortcut for hibernation is not great. I've looked around and it seems like KDE had hotkey issues a while back (e.g. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182672) but nothing really later than 2009. Is this still an issue for some people (or are the T60's so old this isn't really an issue anymore )? I've seen the thinkpad wiki articles on changing the hotkey masks, http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_get_special_keys_to_work#Triggering_key_events, but I'm out of my depth there. Any advice or pointers on the matter would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.