Toshiba LED Media Buttons kind of work?

[rhbeards]

I'm running Linux Mint 13 (Maya) 64-bit on my Toshiba Satellite A665-S6086. The Laptop has media buttons above the keyboard that are LEDs and are touch sensitive. I've tried using xev to at least get a keycode for the buttons, but none registers.

The buttons illuminate when the computer first boots and the BIOS is running, but as soon as Linux begins to load, the buttons turn off. The mute, volume up and volume down buttons work just fine, although they are not illuminated, as well as the wireless on/off button. I'd like to restore light and functionality to all of the keys. From left to right, I have an eco utility function (which I'd like to attach to Jupiter's power saving mode), wireless on/off, a sort of arrow in a box which turned all of the LEDs (including Satellite emblem and light above touchpad) on/off in Windows, play/pause, mute (which works), volume down (works), and volume up (works).

If someone could help me figure out a solution to this it would be great. And just as background, I've run Linux a total of 2 months in the past two years, and that is the depth of my Linux knowledge. In normal circles, my tech-knowledge is about 4/5, but I have a feeling that in these forums I'm closer to 1 or 2/5. Be gentle

[AlbertP]

It seems this laptop is not supported by the toshiba_acpi driver.

Maybe the omnibook driver will work, but that driver hasn't been updated for a while so it's possible that it doesn't work on recent Linux versions. The driver's README says it can enable hotkey buttons on certain laptops.

[rhbeards]

Thanks for the reply! I tried the omnibook driver with no luck. Any other suggestions?

[JackDeth]

I inherited this same laptop and I'm having the exact same issue but with Mint 17. I've tried several different kernels and I've tried several different Wifi cards. The laptop thinks that the Wifi is disabled and I think it considers the Wifi button on this media bar thingie to be the "hard switch" but since the bar isn't working I cannot turn on Wifi - even with Fn-F8.

Has anyone figured out how to get this LED bar thing working?

[AlbertP]

If you successfully swapped wifi cards already, you could consider taping over the pin on the card which controls the hard block (note: this only works if the phy0 is the only hard block in rfkill list, not if other wifi related hard blocks exist too in the output). It will circumvent the wireless button; you won't be able to put your laptop into aeroplane mode that way but that is probably just a minor issue.
I think there are a lot of guides on the web how to do this for Mini-PCI and Mini-PCIe cards (the pin used for this differs between these types of cards).

[JeremyB]

I inherited this same laptop and I'm having the exact same issue but with Mint 17. I've tried several different kernels and I've tried several different Wifi cards. The laptop thinks that the Wifi is disabled and I think it considers the Wifi button on this media bar thingie to be the "hard switch" but since the bar isn't working I cannot turn on Wifi - even with Fn-F8.

Has anyone figured out how to get this LED bar thing working?

Try the wifi button on the media bar just after startup when the Toshiba splash screen is up. You might want to check BIOS for any wifi setting.

Did this laptop have an Intel wifi card with WiMax? If it did, you might not be able to use any other wifi