multimedia keyboards

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, Nathan Aubrey wrote:
> I just acquired a new keyboard and its got some nice fancy keys on it,
> volume control and whatnot. How to I configure these to work in KDE?
> Its also got a bunch of extra buttons like back,forward,refresh,stop
> mail,mycomputer,home and I'd like to do something with them.

xbindkeys or gtk-xbindkeys, possibly combined with xmacroplay ( 
http://xmacro.sourceforge.net/ ).  I've written extensively on this topic in 
comp.os.linux.x.  Basically:

xbindkeys -k
(press non-standard key, get:)
"NoCommand"
  m: 0x0 + c:195

(this means the non-standard key has no command bound to it, has no modifiers, 
and keycode 195)

Alter the lines xbindkeys -k spits out to read:
"/home/me/bin/dosomething.sh &"
  m:0x0 + c:195

...add this to your ~/.xbindkeysrc .  Then set up ~/bin/dosomething.sh like 
so:

#!/bin/bash
echo -e "KeyStrPress Alt_L\nKeyStrPress Left\nKeyStrRelease Left\n\
KeyStrRelease Alt_L" | xmacroplay :0
# end, make sure to chmod+x it

...finally, start xbindkeys or kill -TERM it and restart it if it's already 
running.  Now pressing the odd key will send Alt+Left to the X server, 
meaning it's become the "back" key in Firefox/Konqueror.

The frontend gtk-xbindkeys may make it a tad easier to set stuff up.  If 
you're not running compiz/beryl/compiz-fusion, you can use wmctrl in the 
shell scripts that xbindkeys launches to do things like "if a kcalc is 
running, send it to the current virtual desktop and activate it.  If no kcalc 
is running, start one."  This can be very useful/nifty.  HTH,

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