[[!meta title="Dell Latitude E5500 and Magic SysRq"]]
[[!meta date="2009-11-17"]]
[[!meta author="rohieb"]]
[[!meta license="CC-BY-SA 3.0"]]

At work I’m using the Dell Latidude E5500 notebook, running on Debian
testing.  Today, I had some issues with Xorg which could not detect my
keyboard and mouse, so I tried to do the Magic SysRq tricks (you can
read about it at [Wikipedia][1]).  Unfortunatley, to press `SysRq` (on
`F10`), I had to use the `Fn` key, so if I pressed e. g.
`Alt`+`Fn`+`SysRq`+`U`, the `U` was detected as `keypad 4` because of
the `Fn` key.  Luckily, it works as intended if you release the `Fn` key
after having pressed `Fn`+`SysRq`, so to remount all mounted filesystems
in read-only mode, you would actually hold `Alt`, hold `Fn`, hold
`SysRq`, release `Fn`, press `U`.

Never thought notebook keyboards were so smart :-)

[1]: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq)

[[!tag Debian howto Debian_testing Dell_Latitude Linux SysRq]]