Ubuntu – Function key on the acer laptop is always pressed

According to the Zenbook Prime community page, the answer is "yes", with a caveat. It looks like the problem will be fixed in a 3.7.x version of the kernel (see this bug), but still exists in 3.5.x (i.e. Ubuntu 12.10).

For now, you can try applying this patch to the 3.5.x kernel. For instructions on building the kernel and applying patches, see here. Again, according to the Zenbook Prime community page the patch is imperfect. The brightness-down key works fine, but the brightness-up key imposes an ~2 second delay before other hotkey presses are registered.

The community page also lists a couple of workarounds that involve the xrandr command. The second workaround involves a custom script that is then mapped to Ctrl+Shift+F5/F6. You could, of course change the keymapping to anything you like (say just F5 or just F6, for example).

This seems to be a common problem on most MSI laptops, including my own GP62 6QF Leopard Pro. Supposedly, one way to fix it would be to update your BIOS, however, this didn't work for me.

I managed to fix this by adding this to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-quirks.conf:

  Section "InputClass"
  Identifier "Spooky Ghosts"
  MatchProduct "Video Bus"
  Option "Ignore" "on"
  EndSection

This basically ignores messages from the Video Bus, which seems to be sending psuedo fn+up fn+down messages randomly.

Source: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2314161&page=2

EDIT: Note that this is not a permanent fix as 10-quirks.conf is a file frequently overwritten by OS updates. The most recent update at this time of writing, released on the 7th of August, had overwritten this file and the above-mentioned script was not retained. To fix it back again, you'll just have to type it back in again, or submit a bug report informing them about this fix.

FYI, the 10-quirks.conf file is used for exactly this cause -- to fix bugs caused by hardware incompatibilities.