PBButtons is a program suite to support laptop specific functions and make them available again under Linux. Basically it was developed to support the special hotkeys of an Apple iBook, Powerbook or TiBook but since version 0.5 the design has been changed to support all kind of laptops or notebooks.

With this programms the keys for the display brightness, the volume of speaker and headphone, the mute key and the eject key will do their job as expected. The daemon also do some power management tasks including low battery warnings, dimming the display if idle, sleep on command, etc.

The main part of PBButtons is the daemon pbbuttonsd which work as a server that do all the work. It runs in background and is preferable started at boot time. Multiple clients could register themselves to get messages about events from the server.

The smallest client is pbbcmd which allows to change all of pbbuttonsd options at runtime from the command line. It could ask for the status of each option and could also change it. This client is now part of the pbbuttonsd package.