spec on "multimedia buttons"

[George Staikos]

On Friday 01 August 2003 11:12, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> A lack of good hardware detection and keyboard configuration at the
> system level doesn't really make me think we should write a new "spec"
> for multimedia button configuration. X has support for these. If you
> think configuring a single keyboard with media keys is hard... try to
> set up multiple keyboards (like say, for when you dock your laptop) or
> something... and then pull in the multiple-architecture issue. Trying to
> make a PC keyboard work like a Mac keyboard is not fun. :) Maybe we
> should try to get those distributions that do have semi-good hardware
> detection to improve it for keyboard/mouse configuration, so that they
> will just set up the modmap properly automagically.
>
> Then, it would probably be wise to have some daemite that is started by
> the session manager, handle some kind of OSD/execution setup, so that
> all the keys are just happy. We may have Acme, gtkpbbuttons, and all of
> those other things like that, but they are only halfway, specific
> solutions, or at least, seemed to be when I looked at them.

   Yes, this stuff should be rather trivial to implement in each desktop and 
in most cases shouldn't even require configuration.  I don't see a problem 
with have pbbuttonsd running on a mac, and other solutions running on other 
machines.  Each piece of hardware works differently and there's no sense 
making a generic solution for all of them.

   KDE 3.2 includes a kded module that displays OSD notification for events 
such as special keypresses and we didn't even need to add a configuration 
panel yet.  It just "works".  I mean, how many ways can you configure "volume 
up" to raise the volume?  Just have a specific daemon running, where 
necessary, to capture the events from the hardware, and then have a process 
in the desktop that picks off the events and displays as much or as little 
information as the user or programmer decides is necessary.  It's better to 
keep the hardware event processing in a system daemon for multiple reasons 
too.  You can provide access to privileged operations, for instance.

   I don't see a need for any "standard" here, and I think any attempt would 
be futile since hardware is constantly changing.

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/