I was trying for a while to make my Function Keys (volume, keyboard lights, etc) work in KDE 4.x, and I was finely able to do it with a *funny* workaround. It turns out that the Fn keys works just fine in Gnome, so I dig a little bit and found that the responsible of making this work is a small daemon called gnome-settings-daemon… So it’s just a matter of starting up this daemon in KDE and that’s it.
So, for doing that I just needed to add the next bash file:
$vi ~/.kde/Autostart/gnome-settings-daemon.sh
and add this line:
For Debian:
gnome-settings-daemon
For Fedora:
/usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon
we save the file and then add exec permissions
$chmod u+x ~/.kde/Autostart/gnome-settings-daemon.sh
Now you need to logout and login again and that’s it.
For getting the screen brightness function keys working properly, we need to edit our xorg.conf file:
#vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Under the section “Device” we need to add:
Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
So, at the end, our “Device” section should look similar to:
Section "Device" Identifier "Video Card" Driver "nvidia" Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1" EndSection
You need to reboot in order to get this working.
Hope that works for you. 🙂
You may want to add the package gnome-icon-theme-symbolic to enable the icons when you adjust the keyboard backlight for example 🙂
Do you have issues with the turn off wifi switch? I can turn off my wifi but not on again, this also, only happens in KDE. In Gnome it acts like expected.