Multimedia keys interpreted as alphabetic keys

[Chris Bird]

Thanks very much for getting back to me so soon.

That seems to have fixed the problem, and I will use this version until 
it's in the main build, thanks.

There are a couple of side effects:

1) XWin dies immediately after outputting a message on startup if I pass 
it both -multiwindow and -logverbose - either in combination with other 
parameters seems to be fine. I have included output into XWin.0.log in 
this instance below.

2) When I ssh to another machine and start the Kate text editor, the 
fonts of the menus and the file being edited are larger than usual (ie. 
larger than when I use it with my old version of XWin). I restarted the 
old XWin and did the same and they were back to normal size. I'm not 
sure where to look for useful logging information on this.

----------------XWin.0.log starting with with %RUN% 
XWin.20100418-git-9594fb420a063608.exe  -multiwindow -clipboard 
-silent-dup-error -xkblayout gb -logverbose-------------------

Welcome to the XWin X Server
Vendor: The Cygwin/X Project
Release: 1.8.0.0 (10800000)
Snapshot: 20100418-git-9594fb420a063608

Contact: cygwin-xfree@cygwin.com
XWin was started with the following command line:

/usr/bin/XWin.20100418-git-9594fb420a063608 -multiwindow
  -clipboard -silent-dup-error -xkblayout gb -logverbose

ddxProcessArgument - Initializing default screens
winInitializeDefaultScreens - primary monitor w 2560 h 1024
winInitializeDefaultScreens - native DPI x 96 y 96
winInitializeDefaultScreens - Returning
use: X [:<display>] [option]

[displays usage info]

--------------------------

On 18/04/2010 22:10, Jon TURNEY wrote:
> 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
>

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