Casper.Dik at Sun.COM wrote:
>> A similar mechanism was provided using hal/libhal on Linux, and there was
>> quite
>> a bit of traffic on the hal aliases at freedesktop.org to create patches for
>> such keys from people who had unsupported laptops.
>>
>
> In many cases, the keys are just "keyboard keys" and they should be
> handled through the keyboard driver.
>
> In other cases, they are all "ACPI" events.
>
> I would like those to be presented as keyboard keys; and then you can
> easily use GNOME something or other to bind an event to the key press.
> (It's not entirely clear to me why you can't bind one event to multiple
> keys)
>
> Casper
>
>
I had suggested a similar approach (using keyboard keys) -- actually my
original suggestion went a step further, and suggested that this module
could emulate a USB keyboard and generate USB boot-protocol HID keyboard
events.
However, the problem, as I understand it, is that as rich as the USB
spec is, there are still some keys that lack standard keyboard defines
in the USB spec -- e.g. the WLAN toggle key, and LCD backlight control keys.
I think the current plan has the X server generate key events (X11
events) so that tools like gnome can operate on them the same way as
ordinary keys. While not as elegant as a lower level emulation would
be, I think it is reasonable.
-- Garrett
