I'm almost embarrassed to come up with such a trivial question, but this one's really bugging me.

I have a Nortek Diva keyboard and my machine runs Mandriva. In Mandriva 2009, pressing the "magnifying glass" button on my keyboard took me straight to the Firefox Search bar. Fantastic! Now that I've upgraded to Mandriva 2010, however, pressing the same button just launches the search engine as a new tab (okay, I can live with that), but the cursor is not active in the Search field.

I've been to the Nortek site but there are no drivers for the keyboard, Linux or otherwise. And no Nortek keyboard configurations appear in the Mandriva Linux Control Centre. I know how to use xev to capture keystrokes. What I'd like to know is, how can I map the keyboard button to position a cursor in the Firefox Search bar? I use Search A LOT, so this is really slowing me down. I bet it's something like "firefox %search". Any help gratefully received. (I'm using Firefox 3.5.3)

SC

There doesn't seem to be any way to customise Firefox keyboard shortcuts so the trick will be to map the "magnifying glass" button on your keyboard to the standard shortcut. Best ensure the standard shortcut (Ctrl+K?) works first!

IDK about that; maybe xkbd and xmodmap are involved. I think there's an X utility to show you what each key generates but I can't remember its name. At a command prompt on a virtual terminal (accessed by Ctrl+Alt+F<1 to 6>) the showkey command does it (you have to wait for it to timeout).

Not so many questions here about "maginfying glass" keys but several about brightness and volume control keys so might be worth searching LQ for those threads to get an idea of how key mapping is done.

catkin, thanks for the info! The utility to capture keystrokes is "xev", as I mentioned in my first post. But now that I know to map it to "Ctrl+k", that's the problem solved.

All I have to do now is live with Mandriva 2010 until the Mandriva team fix what they broke from Mandriva 2009! Thanks again and have a happy new year.

S C