Then last Christmas, my wife gave me a Rii wireless keyboard/trackpad to use with the Raspberry Pi. It worked nicely for the most part, but for some reason the function keys wouldn't work. The function keys on this keyboard double as media keys (for volume, etc,), but even when pressing the "fn" button they refuse to act as function keys like they should. This made switching to "full screen" mode in Chrome a little difficult.
Fortunately, there's a way to make them work perfectly, and like most things in the Linux world, it's not at all straightforward or simple. Fortunately, I managed to figure out the steps to accomplish this fix not only once, but twice. I got most of the steps from this article here, but I decided to write them down here for anyone else as well (in my own clumsy way) who might need them.
- First, go and download this hid-apple-patch. Put it somewhere easy to find on your Raspberry Pi and unzip it (right clicking and choosing "extract here" works nicely). This is a "patched hid-apple kernel module."
- Next, you need to install something called "dkms" (Dynamic Kernel Module Support). Open the terminal app and enter "sudo apt-get update" then "sudo apt-get upgrade" to update everything first. Then do "sudo apt-get install dkms."
- Now with dkms installed, navigate your way in the terminal to the folder you unzipped in step 1. Then do the following commands to build and install the patch.
- sudo dkms .
- sudo dkms add .
- sudo dkms build hid-apple/1.0
- sudo dkms install hid-apple/1.0
- Next, use the nano text editor to open the config file:
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf - Add this single line to the empty text file: options hid_apple fnmode=2
- Save the text file and reboot
Ta-da! Your Rii wireless keyboard now has function keys that work when you press the "fn" button.
