Dell Laptop front buttons
 

Hi there!
Yes You!

i've got a DElL xps (don't remember the exact number, but I'll look it up for you if you ask me nicely ;)) and it's got lights and buttons.
(fan lights, back screen panel lights and speaker lights).
In windows there's a program which makes them flash, and change colour, and so on. I kinda liked to have that... Is there any way possible somebody coded that for linux?

Buttons:
There are also some buttons...
- Media Direct
- On/off
- Mute
- Increase sound
- Decrease sound
- Play/Pause
- Previous
- Next
- Stop

Only the on/off button works. (thank god it works)
Anybody any clue how I can get the other one's working?
I especially like the mute, increase and decrease buttons...


Best regards


P.s. I use mandriva powerpack2007 ;-)

http://www.linux.com/feature/118179

Going to use 2008, btw? It'll be on the mirrors very soon. :)

I might use 2008. Depends on the extra features, price, size, ...
As in exaple, will somebody finally have made a program that allows me to emulate the latest photoshop, ...

Thanks for the link, I'm looking into it right now :)

hey i think most of the volume and play pause related buttons can be directly assigned with the keyboard shortcuts option , as of if u are using Fedora 7 or even FC 6 , but i am not sure about the media direct thing, i am not sure whether u can make that work in the Linux env, but u can keep the Media Direct option safe by not fiddling with that partition !

Hello,

Well, I've tried to use those buttons with the shortcut keys and all, but the system sees I'm pressing a key, but can't define it.
Pretty pity ...
I'd need a tool which can see what key's I'm pressing, so I can know how to define them...

on opensuse and my inspiron 1705, they "just work"

That tool is xev. Run it in a console and dont touch anything except the key your trying to define. You will get various info including a 'key #' for example my vol. up key is 176 write it down and do it for all the unassigned keys. now look for a hidden file in your home directory called .Xmodmap open it in kate or whatever, look for the key # to define. It's a listing of key #'s like this

keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute
keycode 161 =
keycode 162 =
keycode 163 =
keycode 164 =
keycode 165 =
keycode 166 =
keycode 167 =
keycode 168 =
keycode 169 =
keycode 170 =
keycode 171 =
keycode 172 =
keycode 173 =
keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
keycode 175 =
keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume

Under Kde you can see these under Kmix-> show mixer->configure Global Shortcuts.
A list of possible keysyms can be found in /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB or /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB (the location of XKeysymDB may differ across distributions).

This link should help http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Use_Multimedia_Keys also a search here for xev will point you to some answers.

Thanks, I'll try that asap after I installed the 2008 :-)