Hello everybody,

My fiancee has a Toshiba Satellite C55-A5300 laptop and I am trying to switch her to Linux/Ubuntu. Everything works perfectly except only one thing. She has really gotten used to function keys (F1-F12) acting as HotKeys/Multimedia keys, i.e. she doesn't have to hold Fn key to change brightness, volume, etc (don't ask me why, lol, she just really likes it that way).

So I googled for days. I have found many posts where people are trying to achieve the opposite (F1-F12 act in a standard way, HotKeys require Fn to be pressed) and nobody seems to ever want F1-F12 keys acting as the HotKeys by default (including me, I hate it).

Details and what I've tried:
1) I'm installing Ubuntu 14.04 for her.
2) BIOS has an option for this specific feature ("Standard" and "Special Keys" modes), but changing it in the BIOS doesn't make Ubuntu act any different. With either option F1-F12 keys in Ubuntu act as normal F1-F12 keys.
3) I even re-installed windows on it one time by now to check if it does the same there. In windows the BIOS setting for the HotKeys is applied properly, i.e. setting it to "Special Keys" make pressing F10 increase volume without Fn, etc.
4) I tried updating the BIOS (in fact forced the same version update via bootable CD).
5) Tried resetting BIOS settings to default from the BIOS itself, no change in behavior.
6) Tried resetting BIOS settings to default from windows with a special Toshiba HWSettings utility, no luck.

So it seems to me that somehow Ubuntu ignores the setting in the BIOS and makes F1-F12 keys act as standard at all times. Maybe BIOS option doesn't change the keys behavior on the hardware level, but just provides an option for the OS to read and act upon accordingly? Is this possible? If so, can I change/reverse HotKeys behavior from Ubuntu on software level? Any help is highly appreciated, I'd really like to make one more person a Linux convert.