Support for keyboards with special scancodes

I have an Logitech Internet Navigator keyboard that has nice little 'play', 'pause', 'e-mail' buttons of all kinds (As many of us do, i believe). I couldn't find any specialised keyboard drivers in the kernel. Only different locales.

I'me wondering if it was possible to write a driver that would overlay the existing keyboard driver and pitch non-standardized scancodes codes in a /dev file (in a standard format). One could then create a daemon that would poll this file for changes to this file and perform the resulting action.

We could create some sort of standardized protocol for many types of 'special' keyboards. For example, a logitech keyboards sends a '0x0e' as a special scancode.

A simplified example;

The driver reads the scancode and recognizes it as 'Internet Browser'. The driver therefore writes a 'IBrowserButton' command in the dev file, which would be polled by a daemon/applet and would launch the appropriate action relative to this scancode.

Does something like this already exist?

Can I get your comments on my idea?

Thanks!

***********************************
Andre Bonin
Computer Engineering Technologist
Webmotion, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada
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Yes, and there's an app called "hotkeys" which assigns actions to these keys (e.g. launch Evolution or KMail on a press of the "mail" key)

Xav

Hi,

Gosh, that sounds insane!

I'd rather add it as usual, dumb, boring, static keys.

Regards,
Thunder

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I don't think they are standard on every keyboard. Unless we have a way to have different keyboard drivers...