SONY VAIO VGN-FE21M; Fn buttons and webcam not working

zen_guerrilla · Guru Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 343 Location: Greece

Hello all,
I've got a new Sony VAIO VGN-FE21M laptop which runs Linux without problems and everything seems to work,
except the Fn buttons (brightness etc.) and the webcam.
I manually adjust the brightness with smartdimmer at the moment, but I'd prefer to press Fn+F5 (or F6) instead.
Also I can't find any information on how to make the webcam to work. It's not recognised by the sonypi kernel
module.
Any suggestions ?

TIA,
zen

giessie · n00b Joined: 10 Mar 2005 Posts: 66

I am sorry that I can't (yet maybe) help you with your problem, but thank you for the info.
I plan to buy a Vaio FE and eventually install gentoo on it and this encourages me.

Just an idea: can't you just assign keyboard shortcuts to this smartdimmer?
I don't know this program, but it works for me under KDE and this really stylish 3d desktop switching program.
I just added the program with parameters to the K-menu and set shortcuts for it.

zen_guerrilla · Guru Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 343 Location: Greece

Mute and Vol +/- work and I use them with xbindkeys (I don't use KDE) but the Fn-+ keys are not available. You can test
which keys are available with the xev program.