(Non-geeks will probably want to ignore this entry)

If you buy a keyboard these days, chances are that it will have a number of extra keys on it. Ones for opening your email application or your web browser or for controlling the CD player. If you’re using Windows then your system probably came pre-configured to use those buttons, but on Linux I’ve always pretty much assumed that the buttons were useless.

But I was wrong. Yesterday I came across LinEAK (which apparently stands for “Linux support for Easy Access and Internet Keyboards”). This is a daemon that runs on your system watching for keys being pressed. When one of these extra keys is pressed, LinEAK steps in and runs whatever command you have associated with that key.

Of course, LinEAK needs to support your keyboard. It didn’t support mine (a Dell SK-8135) but it only took ten minutes to work out what the keycodes were for the extra keys and create a keyboard definition for my keyboard. And then a few minutes later I had useful commands running for all of the buttons. Well, not quite all of them. I need to do a bit more research on controlling Firefox from the command line, so I can set up things like the ‘back, ‘forward’ and ‘refresh’ buttons.

Oh, and the volume control on my keyboard isn’t a button. It’s a rotating thing that LinEAK doesn’t seem to recognise. More research needed there.

But all in all it was a successful hour’s work.