[arch-general] Microsoft keyboard and unworking keys

[Andre Ramaciotti]

Celti <celticmadman at gmail.com> writes:

> 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

I'm glad, too. Thank you! :)