Bug#372909: Support for 'Cherry CyMotion Master LINUX' keyboard
package: xlibs
severity: wishlist
Hello!
Since the last weekend I am the proud owner of this special
Linux-keyboard manufactured by Cherry [1]. It has only one problem: It
does not work under Linux ;)
After plugging the keyboard in (PS/2) I changed the line
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to
Option "XkbModel" "cymotionlinux"
and restarted X to see if the new buttons work.
Well, xev told me that about half of the special buttons (e.g. the ten
on the left and right side of the keyboard) do not even send keycodes to
the X server. On the cdrom which is bundled with the keyboard there is a
package which installs you a daemon (!) to interpret the key events as
well as somthing like a control center application, which wants you to
install half of KDE as well...
Because I did not want to run the daemon, I started some web research
for an alternative way to get the special keys working and found a very
detailed (german) howto in an ubuntu-forum [2]. They refer to a command
line to set the right keycodes which can be found in a (again german)
howto from Gentoo [3]. The line reads like this:
setkeycodes e065 136 e070 161 e032 172 e05f 143 e063 145 e06d 171 e00b
177 e012 178 e017 137 e00a 135 e018 133 e071 148 e02c 149 e072 202 e007
129 e008 131 e05b 200
After running this as root and hacking it into a runlevel script as
suggested, now X receives a keycode from every single key on this
keyboard. We see, it is possible to get it running without Cherry's
daemon, simply using X's 'household remedies'.
--> My question is: Why do I have to do this manually? Why doesn't X
interpret the keys correctly, although the "cymotionlinux" keyboard
model is selected in the xorg.conf?
Next problem is, that now all keys send keycodes, but most of them have
cryptic names while some others send names like 'XF86Stop'. The ubuntu
howto now tells that in this case you have to edit the
file /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/inet in order to add some lines to the
'xkb_symbols "cymotionlinux"' section and remove some other lines. After
another restart of X, all buttons now send their 'names'.
--> Next question: Why do I have to do this manually? I expect that if a
keyboard is supported, that all of it's keys are translated in
the /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/inet file.
This problem is not limited to the xlibs-packages, because xkb-data and
xkb-data-legacy also include the
(incomplete/wrong) /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/inet file.
Is there any chance to get this fixed?
Thank you very much.
Nice greetings,
Fabian
[1]http://www.cherrycorp.com/english/office/cymotion-line_master_linux.htm
[2]http://www.ubuntu-forum.de/artikel/9825/1/Cherry-CyMotion-Master-Linux-Dapper.html
[3]http://de.gentoo-wiki.com/Cherry_CyMotion_Master_Linux#.C3.84nderungen_in_Dateien_vornehmen
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