Hotkeys under linux
Pommed - getting the MacBook Hot keys to work
I have tried macbook-backlight, but for some reason it doesn't work for me. Therefore, I have searched the web to find a program which activates the hot keys (F1 – F5) to control the backlight and sound on my MacBook.
I have found pommed and it works great after some work around on Ubuntu.
Pommed supports iBooks and PowerBooks, too.
1. Dependencies
First of all install some dependencies, except libsmbios, because the Ubuntu dev package is missing a file. So install:
zlib
libconfuse
libdbus
libasound
including all dev packages. The author of pommed has forgotten one dependencies, so install this package, too:libconfuse
libdbus
libasound
pciutils
Now we need a working libsmbios-dev packages. Debian has already fixed the problem, therefore I just downloaded the Debian package and installed it, unfortunately it is linked against a newer version of libasound. So install it with -f (force)! You can download the packages here. After compiling pommed you can remove the dev package!
The last thing we need to update is our kernel, because pommed needs at least a 2.6.19 kernel. So download the kernel sources from kernel.org. And you find a working kernel config here (device mapper is not activated in this config, so don't forget to change that if you use cryptsetup).
Now build your kernel with
make-kpkg initrd revision 1 kernel_image kernel_headers
and install the two deb files and change your lilo.conf.Cross your fingers and reboot!
2. setup pommed
Change to the pommed directory and compile pommed by
make pommed
If everything compiled without an error, you can copy pommed to /usr/bin, pommed.conf into /etc, dbus-policy.conf to /etc/dbus-1/system.d/pommed.conf! Now you need to restart dbus.
You only need to execute pommed to activated the hot keys. I have add this line to my rc.local and activated rc.local in my runlevel:
/usr/bin/pommed
Therefore, I don't need to start pommed after every boot.I hope this small tutorial has helped you to setup pommed!