I want to make some comment about my researches in sony-laptop
* Vaio are not equal in front of the driver: FE et specially FS series are not 
handled correctly, for the others it works much better (with fn keys, webcam, 
jodial,...). Therefore, the distinction should be made between FE and FS series 
on one side and the others on the other side as the problems are probably 
completely different.

* As explained, there is a bug in the hotkey-setup package, "modprobe
sonypi" should be removed from "/etc/init.d/hotkey-setup"

* sony-laptop works partially with FS (mine laptop): as Trip said it
understand the FN keys but cannot correctly transfer them (see next
point)

* They are 3 method used to transfer the FN keys

 1) Writing in a file (sony_acpi way): /sys/class/backlight/sony/fnevent
(not sure it is the correct path and name as I'm not using my Vaio right
now but you'll surely find the file). Prepare "$ cat
/sys/class/backlight/sony/fnevent" in a terminal, press a FN key and
press ENTER just after, you'll see a number (a power of 2) which is
different for each FN keys. As this was the method used by sony_acpi, I
rewrote fsfn, the daemon which was looking for the same kind of file for
sony_acpi, to work with sony_laptop. And it works perfectly! But this is
not really a viable solution: there is already a daemon (hal) which is
designed to the job in a much better way (via Dbus rather than writing
to a file). There should be no use to rewrite such a daemon. Anyway,
this can be a temporary fix.

 2) The FN keys should be transformed into scancodes. These scancodes
should be recognised by hal and translated into a command after looking
for a correspondence in /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/30
-keymap-module-sony-laptop.fdi  This file is rather not complete, you
can try to add your laptop. I've used the word "should" here because, it
doesn't work :) try "$ dmesg | tail"  after pressing a couple of FN
keys, you'll see the the scancodes are unrecognised. To see what should
be the output, press the power button (and when ask for confirmation:
cancel) and look at the message. It should be something like this:
sony/hotkey SPIC 00000001 00000010  To conclude this method, I think
fixing this part of the driver should do the trick. I try to tweak the
driver but I didn't manage :( Some expertise in acpi (what I've not)
would be great!

 3) The fn keys are also transfer to the X system via a new input
devices called Sony Vaio Keys. I try to use this features but all my
tests failed. I'm not sure but I think this is related to the issue
present in method 2

* It could be interesting to check if method 1 works for you.
* I guess method 2 doesn't work (on the contrary you wouldn't be reading this 
bug), but what are your error message in dmesg (or acpid) ?
* Have you try method 3? I'll post what kind of messages I get from Xorg and 
dmesg when I'll be back on my Vaio this evening.

Toufik
Vaio FS-315B

-- 
Gutsy Gibbon and FN keys on Sony Vaio
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/119672
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