Multimedia keys interpreted as alphabetic keys

[Jon TURNEY]

On 14/04/2010 15:37, Chris Bird wrote:
> I wonder if anyone could shed some light on this minor problem I have:
>
> I'm using Cygwin/X as my X client for several linux boxes at work.
> Everything's working fine (after some tweaking), but there is one small
> thing I find very annoying:
>
> The multimedia keys on my keyboard generate keypresses as though they
> were normal keys. Specifically, Play/Pause generates a 'g', volume up
> generates 'c', volume down generates 'b', and mute generates 'd'. The
> keyboard is a logitech Internet 350. As I listen to music all day to
> keep my sanity, and occasionally need to alter the volume or stop or
> mute the track to join in a conversation in the office (or stop driving
> other people mad with my relentless beats!), I often find these
> keypresses being entered into whatever program I'm working on. Not ideal.
>
> I used xev to find out what keycodes were being generated by these keys,
> and by the keys the output would suggest is being pressed, ie. g, c, b,
> and d, expecting to find different keycodes perhaps being mapped to the
> same keysyms, so I could alter .Xmodmap to assign them to XF86Play, etc.
> But I found that they were exactly the same, as if Cygwin was
> interpreting them as the same keys at some very basic level, whereas
> Windows can tell the difference between pressing g (outputs a 'g') and
> pressing Play/Pause (it plays or pauses the current track in my media
> player). Here is the output from xev when pressing Play/Pause, then g:
>
[snip]
>
> They both output 'keycode 42 (keysym 0x67, g)'. I tried various settings
> in the arguments to XWin, to try to enable multimedia keys, and set the
> model of my keyboard and layout correctly:
>
> %RUN% XWin -multiwindow -clipboard -silent-dup-error -xkbmodel
> logitech_base
> REM -xkbvariant extd
> REM -xkbmodel logii350
> REM -xkblayout gb
>
> but none of these made any positive difference, in fact one of them (I
> can't remember which), actually disabled some other keys (e.g. the arrow
> keys).
>
> This behaviour doesn't happen in non-X Cygwin. I tried using Xming get
> some ideas as suggested in this similar-looking post
>
> http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin-xfree/2004-12/msg00249.html
>
> ('Xming.exe :1 -multiwindow -logverbose 10'), and got no useful messages
> about the keyboard.
>
> Has anyone got a clue what's going on? Hope someone can help.

Thanks for the clear problem report.

After doing a bit of testing, the issue here seems to be that XWin doesn't 
know to generate the correct X keycodes for these multimedia keys, so this is 
a bug in XWin, not a problem with the XKB layout selected.

I've added some some entries to the table which translates Windows Virtual 
Keycodes into X keycodes which hopefully fixes this.

Perhaps you could try out the test build I have uploaded at [1] and see if 
that resolves this problem for you?

I've also turned on a bit more debug, so even if this doesn't work correctly, 
  -logverbose should indicate a bit more clearly what's going on...

[1] ftp://cygwin.com/pub/cygwinx/XWin.20100418-git-9594fb420a063608.exe.bz2

-- 
Jon TURNEY
Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer

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