Re: Supporting SYSRQ on broken laptops like the thinkpad T530

[Marc MERLIN <marc@merlins.org>]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 03:36:44AM +0100, Roland Eggner wrote:
> On 2013-01-08 Tuesday at 15:09 -0800 Marc MERLIN wrote:
> > In its infinite wisdom, lenovo has removed the sysrq key on the latest
> > thinkpads, and replaced it with a stupid ALT+FN+S key combination, which
> > doesn't really work for doing sysrq from the console (nor do I know how the
> > genius who did that intended for SYSRQ-S to work).
> > http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430-s-T530-Where-are-the-shortcut-function-keys-break-Pause-etc/ta-p/781749
> > 
> > I realize that one solution is to throw my laptop window at a suitable high
> > floorand replace it with one from a vendor that doesn't randomly remove keys
> > from the keyboard.
> > That said, I was wondering if there were other solutions, especially
> > considering that thinkpads used to be the better linux laptops.
> 
> My Dell “Precision M4500” notebook suffers similar (same?) problem.  So far 
> I could not find a solution better than this:  e.g. Alt-Fn-SysRq-s
> 
> press and hold Alt
> press and hold Fn
> press and leave F10|SysRq
> leave Fn
> press and leave s
> leave Alt

Holy crap. That works for me too. If only lenovo could have been bothered to
document it properly. It's still a pitty to type and remmember the exact
hold and release key sequences, but it's better than nothing.

Thanks much.

> Several months ago a LKML user claimed, his cat had managed to press 
> Alt-Fn-SysRq-c on his Dell Latitude notebook with similar keyboard, and provided 
> photos showing the kernel crash message ;)

Yeah, but my cat is not nearly smart enough for that :)

Thanks for your help again,
Marc
-- 
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R.
Microsoft is to operating systems ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/