Dell Latitude E5500 and Magic SysRq
November 17, 2009
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). 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 🙂
Categories: Debian, howto
Debian Testing, Dell Latitude, Linux, SysRq
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Notes to myself 
Ah. Thank you for the tip about releasing the Fn key after having pressed Fn+SysRq. Without it, I was unable to use the magic sysrq keys on my Dell D420. Very useful!
I have been looking for a long time for a solution to use magic keys on a Dell E6400 laptop, I thought I tried all the possible ways of pressing and releasing relevant keys. After some time I gave up thinking that this is a BIOS bug, so it came to me as a huge surprise today when I stumbled upon your blog. Thank you very much for sharing!
This helped with my E6520. Thanks for sharing this tip!