[arch-general] Microsoft keyboard and unworking keys

[Celti]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 15:38, Andre Ramaciotti
<andre.ramaciotti at gmail.com> wrote:
> Celti <celticmadman at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 15:23, Celti <celticmadman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 15:19, Andre Ramaciotti
>>> <andre.ramaciotti at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Daenyth Blank <daenyth+arch at gmail.com> writes:
>>>>> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 16:34, Andre Ramaciotti
>>>>> <andre.ramaciotti at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> as in "they don't show any keycode
>>>>>> on 'xev' or 'showkey'".
>>>>>
>>>>> It sounds like those keys are broken. It should be sending something. Is it old?
>>>>
>>>> It's barely used.  I don't think the keys are broken, most probably,
>>>> these keys send the "I've been pressed" signal in a non-standard way
>>>> (you know, it's Microsoft, it wouldn't surprise me at all).  I suspect
>>>> this because this keyboard comes with an installation CD, which probably
>>>> contains some kind of special driver (for Windows and Mac OS X only).
>>>>
>>>
>>> Likely they don't have a kernel mapping, so X doesn't even see them.
>>> You'll need to get their scancodes with `showkeys`, and map them to
>>> keycodes with `setkeycodes`, while out of X.
>>>
>>> ~celti
>>
>> Er, sorry, I'm blind. You said you used showkey. Did you try it with '-s'?
>
> Yay! It did return some key codes, though they were kind of strange,
> like a single key printing '0xe0 0x5d' (instead of a single byte). Will
> I have any problems because of this?

Nope. Those are scancodes, not keycodes. There are plenty of howtos
out there on mapping scancodes to keycodes; it's been long enough
since I've needed to that I've forgotten the exact syntax.

Glad I could help.

~celti