Linux support for laptops has improved by leaps and bounds in the last decade. At this point, if you buy a laptop from any of the major manufacturers and load a Linux distro with a reasonably recent kernel version, things pretty much "just work" – problems with proprietary display drivers aside.

What can sometimes not work, however, are some of the vendor-specific hot keys on the keyboard. For example, I do a lot of presentations, and I'd like the hot key that's supposed to switch between my laptop display and an external monitor (Fn+F7 on my ThinkPad) to work under Linux. In this article, I describe my solution for this problem and offer some pointers for customizing hot key events.

Getting to Know acpid

Most Linux systems support ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface [1]), a popular standard for device configuration and power management. The ACPI standard specifies a structure for defining and customizing hardware events. In Linux, the acpid daemon [2] listens for ACPI events and maps each event to an action. Hot key events are typically handled by acpid.

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