Compaq Presario Notebook Keyboard "Extensions"

Compaq Presario Notebook Keyboard "Extensions"

[Erich Schubert]

Compaq Presario Notebooks (i don't know which ones, at least my Presario
1400 and a friend's Presario 1200) have some additional Keys on the keyboard

These keys apparently do not generate scancodes, i also noticed no
interrupts being generated.
I also tried using "kbd-init", but it didn't help either.

I tried getting information from Compaq, but from their support adress i
got only trashy responses ("we don't support linux on this unix, but you
can try the following [... guide how to connect to the internet with
windows ...]")

Searching with google i found lot's of requests in newsgroups, the
suggestions of using showkeys and xev, but no solution.

Any idea how i might get these keys to work?

I was wondering if there might be an additional set of scancodes, or
some other initialization of the keyboard driver required.
Perhaps someone has contacts to compaq and could get this information
from them. They have some detailed information about their armada
notebook series on their webpage (with detailed listing of non-standard
keycodes etc.), but i could not find analogical information on these
Presario Notebooks.

http://www.compaq.com/support/techpubs/technical_reference_guides/

Thanks for your great work on the Linux kernel.

Greetings,
Erich

Re: Compaq Presario Notebook Keyboard "Extensions"

[Erich Schubert]

> anything. On all desktop PC keyboards that I could lay my hands on
> otherwise, it generates e0 xx scancodes on press and e0 (xx | 0x80) on
> release. Some of these scancodes even seem to be standard (volume up and
> down, play and pause key...). I made a dedicated driver to handle these
> keys for 2.2 already. Not yet ported to 2.4.

You don't need a driver for them at all.
I had been playing with such a driver (for 2.2) which redirect a
configurable set of keys to a special device /dev/funkey or thelike.
Well, i'm not missing this patch now, there's a great tool called
"hotkeys" for X (available as debian package hotkeys) which has an X11
On-Screen-Display for Volume, predefined mappings for most keyboards and
is really easy to customize. I use that for controlling volume and xmms,
as well as launching some apps. (a "new terminal" hotkey is great ;)

Doesn't help here though - it needs scancodes.

Greetings,
Erich

Re: Compaq Presario Notebook Keyboard "Extensions"

[Francis Galiegue]

On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Erich Schubert wrote:

>
> Compaq Presario Notebooks (i don't know which ones, at least my Presario
> 1400 and a friend's Presario 1200) have some additional Keys on the keyboard
>
> These keys apparently do not generate scancodes, i also noticed no
> interrupts being generated.
> I also tried using "kbd-init", but it didn't help either.
>

Exactly the same here. I've been playing some time with extra keys,
either on PC keyboards and notebooks. My Compaq Presario 1926 just acts
like yours when I hit these extra keys: nothing to be seen. Maybe a
dedicated I/O port? Haven't tried yet.

I've also seen two other cases: keys generating NMIs (yes!) and keys
directly "attacking" hardware. In either case, showkey -s doesn't show
anything. On all desktop PC keyboards that I could lay my hands on
otherwise, it generates e0 xx scancodes on press and e0 (xx | 0x80) on
release. Some of these scancodes even seem to be standard (volume up and
down, play and pause key...). I made a dedicated driver to handle these
keys for 2.2 already. Not yet ported to 2.4.

-- 
Francis Galiegue, fg@mandrakesoft.com - Normand et fier de l'être
"Programming is a race between programmers, who try and make more and more
idiot-proof software, and universe, which produces more and more remarkable
idiots. Until now, universe leads the race"  -- R. Cook