How to disable some of the keys on an external keypad, but not on the main keyboard?

General · 04-30-2015, 05:16 AM

I have a laptop with a USB number keypad. Users can access the keypad, the administrator can access the regular keyboard.

I need to disable all of the keys except for the numbers, such as F1, F2, etc.

I found instructions for disabling specific keys at this article.

However, when I used xev to check, I found that the key events have the same identifying number as the key events on the laptop's own keyboard.

How can I disable specific keys on an external USB keypad, but not the keys on the laptop's build-in keyboard?

DavidMcCann · 05-02-2015, 11:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by General

However, when I used xev to check, I found that the key events have the same identifying number as the key events on the laptop's own keyboard.

That's the problem. The keyboard driver works on the scancodes it's given. If you have the same scancode coming from two sources, how can it know which one any specific code comes from?

Presumably, some sort of software could be written which monitored input from the two different ports, and blocked certain codes from one of them, but rather you than me!