[arch-general] Microsoft keyboard and unworking keys

[Celti]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 17:32, André Ramaciotti
<andre.ramaciotti at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 7:45 PM, Andre Ramaciotti <
> andre.ramaciotti at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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 <daenyth%2Barch 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! :)
>>
>
> Actually... I should pay more atention to what I'm doing.  I've just
> realized that I was pressing the wrong key; I was pressing one by the side
> of the key that doesn't produces any code.  They key I should be pressing
> still doesn't show anycode when running showkey as `showkey -s`.

Oh. In that case, it probably does use some silly proprietary
Microsoft thing. No idea how to help there, sorry.

~celti