I've just posted a patch to fix the toshiba_acpi kernel driver to emit INPUT events when the fn hotkeys are pressed. This means that the hardware works out of the box, and integrates nicely with KDE and GNOME without using oddball uinput-injecting system daemons such as FnFX to do the userspace polling. This also obsoletes my hal addon to do basically the same thing.
This is part of the “Unf*ck my keyboard” initiative, and allows us to kill lots of userspace bodges aquired over the years.
Hopefully the patch will get merged in the next merge window, and then that will be Toshiba sorted. My initial IBM patch should be merged soon, and then I can work on the NVRAM mixer interactions with thinkpad_acpi once again. I think Lennart is working on ASUS, and so that will be a good few laptops “just working” sometime soon.