Capslock

[Matt Graham]

From: "Eric Allen"
> I have an Acer Aspire 5532 laptop running Ubuntu 10.04 and I have
> searched with Google to no avail on how to make my laptop beep when
> the capslock key is pressed. My laptop has no indicator light for
> this purpose. Ubuntu forums wasn't much help in this area either. I
> hit the dang thing by accident all the time and it's annoying

The distro-agnostic desktop-agnostic insanely-configurable way to make keys do
something is called xbindkeys .  Your distro *probably* has a package for it
already.  Install xbindkeys, then do "xbindkeys -k" and press Caps Lock. 
It'll probably return something like

    m:0x12 + c:66

...then, you put lines like

"play /path/to/sounds/beep.wav &"
    m:0x12 + c:66

...in ~/.xbindkeysrc .  Then you set things up such that xbindkeys is started
when you log in to X.  (Add it to ~/.kde/Autostart/ in KDE, not sure how GNOME
does this.)  Boo yah, pressing Caps Lock then causes beep.wav to be played. 
Of course, you can make any key press execute any shell command.  This has
obvious implications, like making all the extra buttons on "extended
keyboards" do things like launch kcalc (or switch active window to kcalc if
kcalc is already running), launch a file manager, turn the volume up/down,
switch the video output to the TV, or deploy armies of giant fire-breathing
guinea pigs against your worst enemies.

I've written extensively on this whole xbindkeys thing on comp.os.linux.*
since the early 2000s.  No one anywhere seems to have remembered or indexed
any of those posts, which is... actually just what I'd expect.  Anyhow, hope
this helps,

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
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