On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 6:29 PM, Tom Gundersen
Up until recently, I used to get the zoom slider on my Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 working by following the instructions in a Gentoo Wiki page [2]. In short, by applying a small patch [3] to my custom compiled (ZEN-)kernel the keycodes of the slider are changed to values below 255, enabling the X server to process those keycodes.
I suggest reporting the problem with your keyboard upstream so that they can fix it properly and your patches will no longer be necessary (otherwise they are bound to break again).
The problem actually is that X can't process keycodes above 255. It's a long-standing and hard-to-solve bug [1].
What was the last working kernel, and what was the first broken one? Did you try cloning Linu's tree and doing git log <known good>...<known bad> -- include/linux/input.h
No, because I don't remember when it went wrong (I thought I'd look at that later, without pinpointing the last change; I know, that was stupid). But I just found a patch for xf86-input-evdev [2], so I'll first give that a try. Nevertheless, I'll report this to LKML anyway. Thanks. Marcel [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11227 [2] http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Remapping_remote_control_key_codes_greater_than_2...