Kinesis Freestyle2: fn keys problem on Arch Linux

Update

The solution from this note is now part of the driver itself, so this note is just for a history!

Some of the new owners of Kineis Freestyle2 keyboards can find that the Volume Up/Down, Mute, and Calculator buttons aren’t working.

Chris Waldon had a deep dive into the problem.

He ended up with his driver, kfreestyle2d.

The problem is that on some systems driver is not starting correctly.

As I found out, there are two problems:

Create a systemd service, that will load the module.

Here’s a config for the service, which is a config file at /etc/systemd/system/uinput-load.service:

[Unit]
Description=Load uinput kernel module

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/sbin/modprobe uinput

[Install]
WantedBy=sysinit.target

Run systemctl enable uinput-load to start automatically on startup.

And let’s ensure systemd will load driver after the kernel module.

Add line to the /etc/systemd/system/kfreestyle2d.service to the [Unit] section:

After=uinput-load.service

Create udev rule at /etc/udev/rules.d/99-uinput.rules

With following content:

KERNEL=="uinput", MODE="0660", GROUP="uinput"

The group should be the same as in /etc/systemd/system/kfreestyle2d.service

Run sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

And then just the system.