I don't want my IR handset to act like a keyboard

[Paul Bender]

On 1/12/2010 10:55 AM, Tony Houghton wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:25:11 +0100
> Éric Piel<E.A.B.Piel at tudelft.nl>  wrote:
>
>> Op 10-01-10 19:04, Tony Houghton schreef:
>>> I've got a DVB card with an IR controller which appears as an input
>>> device. I want my applications to read the input device directly, not as
>>> a keyboard. Among other reasons, it's because I want to use the "OK"
>>> button while mplayer is running, but it generates an "Enter" keypress
>>> which mplayer interprets as "please quit".
>>>
>> Interestingly, someone has been complaining of exactly the opposite:
>> http://www.kernellabs.com/blog/?p=1309
>
> That's obsolete too now, because of X not using hal any more.
>
>> Maybe in your case, what you need is just a special keymap for the
>> remote control, and make sure that applications listen to it only via X.
>
> The trouble with that is that I like my application, boxstar, to handle
> the remote presses and pass on commands to mplayer via its "slave"
> interface, but mplayer grabs focus away from boxstar, depriving it of X
> keyboard events. I don't want to have to rely on making special
> exceptions in the window manager.

My solution to this problem is customized udev scripts. Essentially, if 
the device is a remote, then udev does not set x11_driver. Since 
x11_driver is not set, Xorg ignores the device completely.