Linux Mint Forums

Acer Aspire One, 160 GB HDD, 1 GB Ram, Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz.
Mint Helena Gnome 32-bit and XP SP3 32-bit.
I use this netbook in different ¨hardware profiles¨:
sometimes it is connected to external keyboard, mouse and monitor,
Sometimes it is not plugged to anything external, and I use it connected to my own wireless or to some other wireless networks.
I have noticed that it does not take these changes transparently, sometimes it needs an fsck that can only be run plugged into power charger.
Recently the Fn key started malfunctioning, it inverted its behaviour, now to type the letters I need to press and hold the Fn key, the opposite of the expected behaviour.
I cannot type comfortably on the computerś keyboard, need to use an external device.
THIS IS NOT A HARDWARE ISSUE SO PLEASE DO NOT DELETE THIS REPORT.
The key is working, only inverted, this is an OS issue.
I have tried different keyboard layouts to no avail.
When I boot into Windows XP, the key works as expected.
Basically, Mint does not handle the Fn key properly.

I think I moved an earlier report into the support part of the forum - not sure whereto tough as I don't think this really is a bug
It's some configuration error - will come back to you when the flu leaves me so I can think properly

It only affects the internal keyboard because the external keyboard does not have a Fn key.
There is no misconfiguration.
The only changes made were using the netbook in different "hardware profiles".
Although afterwards, I did go into the Keyboard Layout, for the first time, and noticed that the default was set to IRL (Lefebvre's country).
So I set the default to USA and made it system-wide, same error.
Removed IRL and added USA Intl., same thing.
There is no fix within the present system, maybe in 9.
Good luck with the flu.

My newest USB keyboard (which I stopped using as it is no good) has a Fn key but of course most keyboards don't
Beats me what it is - not even a sense of general direction....
May have to ask for help

Hmm - some other team members are also clueless

Try Fn + NumLock... I had 3 Acer's in the past (and a Dell) that had this problem on XP. This worked on XP, don't know about Linux for sure, ditched the Acer's for HP's. It's kind of an ongoing thing with Acer, I had my first experience in 2002, my friend has a new Acer with Win7, same problem, same fix...

Amazing, it worked!
Fn + NumLk fixed it, don´t know why.
An idea is since those function keys are numbers and an asterisk, they get stuck with NumLk, although there is no LED that indicates that.
The strange thing is that this problem never showed up in Windows and you say that you had it in XP.
Anyway, I am now happy that I will be able to type comfortably into my netbook, which I need for a job tomorrow.
Thanks!