Ubuntu Lucid Fix

There's always nice and not so nice surprises when you upgrade your OSes.
If you just upgraded your shiny eeepc 1005HA to Canonical's latest and greatest Lucid Lynx, you probably have noticed that, annoyingly, the sound volume Fn keys are now dead.

At first I thought that they just weren't mapped any more, but after running xev and hitting the flawed keys for a while, I concluded that they were actually not active at all.
My next step was to try and load the eeepc-laptop module, which modinfo's description is "Eee PC Hotkey Driver" and that did nothing but complain:

$ sudo modprobe eeepc_laptop
FATAL: Error inserting eeepc_laptop (/lib/modules/2.6.32-9-generic/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/eeepc-laptop.ko): No such device

Apparently the kernel is ignoring some fn key acpi events on this version. The fix for this is to append some acpi boot options on grub as described here.

In a nutshell, the quick and dirty fix is pretty much:

$ sudo vim /etc/default/grub

Append the acpi options to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT var, mine looks like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"

Finalise it by forcing ubuntu to accept the grub configuration change:

$ sudo update-grub

Everything should be rocking (depending how loud or not you rock) after a reboot.