The Internet Keyboard Lights Challenge

[icedfaith]

ok. i would appreciate some help on this. right at the onset i want to clarify that yes, what im asking for serves no definable purpose, but its just something that i wish could be rectified. ok so here goes:

i have a HP Pavilion t430 i system, running fedora core 4. (i doubt the system specs wil serve any purpose.). the keyboard is also HP model 5219. An internet Keyboard.

On this keyboard, things that work :
keys.. duh
the 'functional lights' - caps lock, num lock etc.
multimedia keys

thing that does not work:
there are speical buttons on top for shopping, connect search etc. u know the internet keys. they dont work and on windows they light up with a pleasant blue that doesnt happen here. anyone got any ideas to activate these keys?

thanx in advance for any effort that will be taken

[cazo]

I have an HP Pavilion with an Internet/Multimedia keyboard. Mine has a green LED under the Connect button. To turn it on, I send a 'ea 70' & to turn it off, I send a 'eb 00 00' using a program called 'send_to_keyboard'. I found a page about keyboard scancodes at http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/kbd/scancodes.html that mentioned something similar, and tried various 'codes' until I found what worked. I do remember having to unplug & replug the keyboard several times (to reset it) and even having to reboot a few times (just a friendly warning if you try this).

The scancode page has the source to 'send_to_keyboard' but you can also find a similar program in lineakd (http://lineak.sourceforge.net).

That should give you a start. Otherwise, you could try to find a 'key logger' to run and record what your Windows driver sends.

[bitrain]

Better way avaiable: keytouch.sourceforge.net
I'm in the process of building a rpm for it, but building the beta worked for me. Note that the beta doesn't mean anything. Documentation is availeble on the site, note that installing is a bit different from normal.

[cazo]

Bitrain,

Thanks for the pointer to keytouch. I'll have to give that a try (it looks like an alternative for lineak).

The 'send_to_keyboard ea 70' is what I use to turn the "Connect" LED on, even though the page I referred to mentioned it being needed to 'activate' the extra keys on some keyboards. Once they are 'activated', they will produce scancodes that can be programmed using something like "lineak" or "keytouch".

One other thing I liked about the Windows driver for my keyboard was the extra keys caused an "On Screen Display". I installed the 'xosd' package (from 'extras') and use that to cause the keys to display a message on-screen.