using microsoft office keyboard with linux
 

i switched from windows to linux and i have a microsoft office keyboard with back/forward, cut,copy,paste/ and application arrows along with a scroll wheel. after getting linux, the features listed above which are on the left side of the keyboard are not working at all!!

Look for some drivers.

www.google.com/linux

use xev to get the scancodes of these keys then you can use xbindkeys to make them do whatever you want.

What I do is somewhat similar - I used xev to figure out the keycodes of those extra keys and buttons first. If a particular key does not produce a keycode, you can use showkey to obtain its scancode and setkeycodes to map it to an unused keycode. Once a keycode was obtained, I used ~/.Xmodmap to map the extra keys to function keys, such as F15, F16, etc. That will let you assign those keys to specific tasks using your Desktop Environment's features.

I use a Microsoft Comfort Keyboard 2.0. I can use all the extra keys on it. :)

daihard,

Could you please post some more detailed instructions on how I can go about doing what you suggest - I have a MS Wireless comfort keyboard, and some of the keyboards don't generate keycodes because they're not mapped using setkeycodes. The bit I'm stuck on is what keycode to choose for each key. Some of the standard ones work "out of the box" - volume up and down, etc, but the rest aren't mapped and are at present unusable.

Any help is appreciated.

Regards
David

More detailed instructions
 

Use the instructions at this webpage: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultimediaKeys .
Although it was written for Ubuntu Linux, it will work on any GNU/Linux distribution.

Hope that helps.

I would recommand you :keytouch or keytouchd
easy to install & to make it!!

I managed , so , it's meaning it's opssible :-)