If you have a curious bent – and you bought a Chromebook thinking it would be the answer to all problems, then chances are you probably gave up on that notion fairly quickly and installed a variant of GNU/Linux on it.
If so, well done. Thankfully, Daniel Berrange – a Red Hat fellow and Fedora users, posted some instructions on how to get Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) installed on a Samsung series 3 (XE303C12) Chromebook. This is the route I decided to take, having been a Fedora user for many years. But I digress.
If you have GNU/Linux installed on a Series 3 Chromebook, you may want to remap those Google-inspired function keys that run across the top. You know, those keys with the arrows, reload, window-size/position, brightness and volume icons… Yeah. Actually, they’re function keys: F1 to F10.
A good read for how to identify what each key is can be found here, on this askubuntu post which details the xev command. Ā xev displays the numeric keycode of the keyboard key (!) you just pressed.
Keys F1-F10 use the following keycodes:
| Key | Keycode | Equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Back | 67 | F1 |
| Forward | 68 | F2 |
| Reload | 69 | F3 |
| Resize | 70 | F4 |
| Stacking | 71 | F5 |
| Bright down | 72 | F6 |
| Bright up | 73 | F7 |
| Mute | 74 | F8 |
| Sound down | 75 | F9 |
| Sound up | 76 | F10 |
To remap these keys, we now need to identify what extended functionality the XF86 multimedia keyset provides.
A reference table is available is available on linux questions.