iBook2 keyboard ...
Hi,
I have an iBook2. It's great! But I've got a few "issues" with the keyboard on
this machine...
1. The Caps Lock key doesn't send key up/key down events like a PC-style caps
lock key, so I can't remap it to Ctrl.
This turned out to be half true. It does send the events, but they're sent
in a slightly odd manner (and are indistinguishable from, say, hitting the
power button on this machine). I have written a small kernel patch to work
around this and make the Caps Lock key behave like a standard PC caps lock
key; it works great for me now!
2. The keyboard sometimes "misses" events. Most annoying is when it misses a
"key up" event. Eg, I press and release the right cursor key, but it misses
the "right cursor key up" event and my cursor keeps scrolling to the right
until I hit the key again. No solution for this one yet -- anyone?
3. The left/right "pretzel" buttons map to the same keycodes, so I can't remap
one to be, say, the right mouse button, without losing the other as well.
Any ideas??
4. Function keys: The function keys have two modes of operation. In the
standard mode, they behave as system control keys ("LCD brightness up",
"Volume up", etc). When I press the magic [Fn] key, they turn into the
F1,F2,...F12 keys. Under MacOS 9 there's a little control panel I can use
to swap this behaviour over -- so they normally behave as F1...F12 and I
have to use [Fn]+Key to get the system control behaviour. I assume that
MacOS toggles a bit in the PMU by sending a magic ADB command or
something?? Weird-ass Apple voodoo. Anyway, I want this behaviour but the
machine seems to periodically "forget" (it requires a power-off, at
least) and returns to the default behaviour. Which is annoying. Is there
a userspace tool which I can run on powerup to send the magic ADB voodoo?
Additionally, this machine seems to periodically time-warp to 1904 -- I assume
that it has no internal battery to power the RTC when the battery and mains
power is disconnected? Arse.
BenH informs me that the internal modem on this machine is a USB modem which
requires some of the modem work to be performed in software on the host CPU.
I've patched my kernel to allow me to power up the modem and indeed doing so
causes the kernel to see the USB device "attach" itself. Anyone working on a
driver for this beast? I'm sure if enough of us write to Conexant we can get
some sort of driver out of them ... I understand they are working on drivers
for their modems under i386 ... Maybe we can get a PowerPC port as well?
Thanks for any tips -- sorry if I'm asking stupid questions, this is my first
Apple machine.
Will
_________________________________________________________________________
William R Sowerbutts will@sowerbutts.com
Coder / Guru / Nrrrd http://sowerbutts.com
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(m=-1;m<7;putchar(m++/6&c%3/2?10:s[c]-31&1<<m?42:32));}
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