
Permalink for comment 507775
RE[5]: finally!
by Doc Pain on Sun 19th Feb 2012 12:15 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: finally!"
Doc Pain
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Is there a way to use Sun Type 5 keyboard through the USB adapter on Linux?

Erm... Type 5 isn't USB, if I remember correctly. Only Type 6 and 7 have the standard (Sun) and USB plug variants. I've only been using the USB variants (Type 6 in the past, Type 7 currently).

There are some interesting building projects to make the non-USB Sun keyboards work on PCs, which is relatively easy as they are serial keyboards:

It works nicely on OpenIndiana with all the extra keys in Gnome in KDE, but on Linux those keys aren't even generating any events.

That might depend on the keyboard driver. In X, check the output for the keys using the xev program, then assign them symbols using xmodmap that can then be picked up by the desktop environment. In my case, I assigned "add mod4 = Multi_key" for the Compose key, And F13...F27 for the other keys, as well as Meta_L, Meta_R and Multi_key (which is the compose key that really works). Window Maker will then pick up those symbols when the key is "captured" in order to be connected to a window management function or a program to launch (through the menu). This can easily be done using Window Maker's configuration utility. Just make sure you load your ~/.xmodmaprc file on X startup.

In Linux, it should work similar as I assume my approach depends on X, not on actual Linux keyboard drivers (which may be different from what FreeBSD offers, but X should be basically the same in this regards).

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