Special Hotkeys For More Control of your Toshiba Laptop using Fedora

Do you want to take control of your LCD brightness, internal fan, special keyboard combination, bolume control, suspend features of your Toshiba laptop?

If you have decided to install Fedora with your Toshiba laptop, here's a quick post on how would you be able to access and control the below issues with your Toshiba laptops.

• LCD brightness


• internal fan


• hot keys map


• volume control


• suspend to disk


• suspend to RAM


• LCD/CRT/TV-out

Fedora supports rpm packages to manage the above issues. You can simply install FnFx rpm package.

FnFX enables owners of Toshiba laptops to change the LCD brightness, control, the internal fan and use the special keys on their keyboard (Fn-x combinations, hot-keys). The internal functions will give the possibility to map the Fn-Keys to functions like volume up/down, mute, suspend to disk, suspend to ram and switch LCD/CRT/TV-out. These functions heavily depend on the system and/or kernel configuration.

You will need at least a kernel (v2.4.x, v2.5.x, v2.6.x) with ACPI and Toshiba support (CONFIG_ACPI and CONFIG_ACPI_TOSHIBA).

To check if ACPI and ACPI Toshiba support are enabled check the following proc entries exists:

/proc/acpi
/proc/acpi/toshiba

If they do exist, FnFX will work on that system. If they do not exist try `modprobe toshiba_acpi' as root. If this throws errors like 'FATAL: Module toshiba_acpi not found' the kernel is most likely not compiled with CONFIG_ACPI and CONFIG_ACPI_TOSHIBA.

Below is a list of Toshiba laptops that worked well with FnFx

• Toshiba Libretto L5W


• Toshiba Portege 2000


• Toshiba Portege 2010


• Toshiba Portege 3440CT


• Toshiba Portege 4000


• Toshiba Portege 7020ct


• Toshiba Portege R100


• Toshiba Satellite 1410-303


• Toshiba Satellite 1410-604


• Toshiba Satellite 1800-821


• Toshiba Satellite 2405


• Toshiba Satellite 2410-303


• Toshiba Satellite 2410-304S


• Toshiba Satellite 2410-514


• Toshiba Satellite 2450-401


• Toshiba Satellite 2450-S203


• Toshiba Satellite 5005-504


• Toshiba Satellite 5100-201


• Toshiba Satellite 5200-801


• Toshiba Satellite 5200-802


• Toshiba Satellite 5200-903


• Toshiba Satellite 5202-S503


• Toshiba Satellite 5205


• Toshiba Satellite 5205-S703


• Toshiba Satellite 5205-S705


• Toshiba Satellite A10-S100


• Toshiba Satellite A10-S203


• Toshiba Satellite A20-S103


• Toshiba Satellite A25-S207


• Toshiba Satellite A40-211


• Toshiba Satellite M30-164


• Toshiba Satellite M30-344


• Toshiba Satellite Pro 490CDT


• Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000


• Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100


• Toshiba Satellite Pro M10


• Toshiba Tecra 8100


• Toshiba Tecra 9000


• Toshiba Texra M1


• Toshiba Dynabook EX1/524CDET (Japanese)

FnFx is distributed under GPLv2 license.


FnFX Installation on Fedora

FnFx is supported by Fedora via yum. Install at your own risk. Take note that this installation heavily depend on your system/kernel configuration.

# yum -y fnfx

FnFX consists of two programs: The daemon `fnfxd` and the client `fnfx`. Fnfxd has to be run as root. While running without fnfx, the daemon reacts on Fn-x combinations and hot-keys which are defined in `/etc/fnfx/fnfxd.conf'. If a instance of fnfx is running, the received Fn-x/hot key events are passed to the client which reads its configuration from '~/.fnfxrc'. While fnfxd only executes internal commands, fnfx can also start arbitrary programs.

If you only want to use the internal commands (changing LCD brightness...), there is no need to run the client fnfx. On the other side, if you really want to map the Fn-x combinations/hot-keys to launch programs, you will need to configure and start both - the server and client.

Visit more details from site. All done.