I've got an HP NC4000 laptop with 6 extra buttons above the usual keyboard, one for "Lock Display", one to turn bluetooth on/off, one for full-screen presentation, and 3 for mute/volume+/volume-.

Question is - how do I map these to function in Slackware?

when pusing a button, I get the following dmesg:
Thus I type

setkeycodes e00a 152 # corresponds to KEY_COFFEE

This is all great, and the dmesg messages now go away, but how do I go from there, to actually invoking the KDE locker for the LOCK-key, or turn volume up/down/mute with their respective keys??

-Y1

Hi Yalla

You could try keytouch (http://keytouch.sourceforge.net/) for which I created a Slackware package some time ago (for a somewhat older version). It lets me use nearly all the additional keys on my wireless Logitech keyboard. Nearly, since I didn't bother with configuring keys I don't use anyway :-)
My package: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/keytouch/
I stopped updating to newer releases mainly due to the less than cooperative approach of the author when I told him I made a package and sent in several patches to fix the build process. But still it is a fine program, could not find anything that comes near.

Eric

Cool thanks much!

Seems like the author has lightened up a bit now, as there's even a link on the web-page asking for package maintainers to report their findings

-Y1

Yeah that link was what I responded to with a link to my package and the patches I wrote... and since then (almost a year ago) nothing else but a few rather arrogant sounding replies, after which I gave up.

Eric

Since you're using KDE I'd just use .xmodmap to create mappings of the keys (you can find out which keycode corresponds to which key by using xev), then use KDE's keyboard tool to map them to commands. I don't use KDE myself, but I know one exists (in the Regional and Accessibility section of the Control Center, I presume).

The problem with this method is that I've found not all the keys generate events, whereas the developer of keytouch claims to be working on supporting every key.

It is called KHotKeys and it is exactly where you said.

I have been trying the same thing, and the keys were enabled, but some keys became temperamental (ie having to press a key combination twice to get the desired character.) There also seemed to be more of an overall time delay.

So I just coded my regional variation into xorg.conf and then forgot about the additional keys, after all I can launch firefox in a number of ways, so I gave up on the keyboard.

Samac

Alien Bob, I noticed you had the keytouch-editor pdf file but not the keytouch-editor itself in your build dir on your site. Did you leave it out because of the same type of build issues you had with the keytouch program?

MagicMan

Yes, and what's worse, the recent versions of Keytouch are Gnome-dependent.
It might need just a few Gnome programs perhaps. The "configure" program at least complains about missing "gnome-menu" and that one can have depencencies too, I did not check further.

Eric

I'm not really interested in a newer version of Keytouch. The one you built seems to work good enough. However, I do need the keytouch-editor program to configure my keyboard (not in the list) and wasn't sure about installing the editor because of those build issues you had. Would it be possible to get a updated package with a version of the editor included for Slack 11.0?

MagicMan

You could try building it yourself. Me, I am not that interested in Keytouch. If I have the time though, I will see what I can do, but I'm quite busy at the moment... it might be quicker doing it yourself.

Eric