Extra keyboard buttons

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 23:27 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> With reference to my recent blog post:
> http://hughsient.livejournal.com/23351.html
> 
> I've been doing some research on how some random vendor buttons are
> currently mapped into keycodes. Distros like ubuntu provide the
> hotkey-setup [1] package that match dmi information and then assign keys
> based on the vendor and type. Fedora don't ship this package.
> 
> Maybe this is an idea for hal-info - we are perfectly in scope as we can
> match DMI data trivially and then launch a very small script that just
> runs commands like:
> 
> setkeycodes e018 188
> 
> hal-info can then be trivially updated as new keys are found for new
> laptops.
> 
> So, good idea / bad idea?

I guess we could expose some of this in hal-info and have a callout in
hal that takes this data and does the same as setkeycodes does. Or
should it live elsewhere?

Also, I think we need to be more ambitious; this weekend I was
reconfiguring my multimedia keyboard, using the "Keyboard Shortcuts"
dialog, to make the Play, Pause, Vol+, Vol-, Mute etc. known to GNOME.
Would it make sense to have this kind of information in hal-info? Or
should it live elsewhere?

I'm fine with having all this in hal-info but _only_ if it's the right
place to store this kind of data.

      David