Mapping keys in Ubuntu 9.04

Good morning!
I have an Acer 5920. There are some groovy "touch" keys along the right hand side of keyboard that work in vista to control DVD play. More keys on left-hand side for launching email client and web browser.

The HDD flickers when I activate these keys, but other than that there's either no visible reaction or the keys do something else entirely. For instance, two of the "touch" DVD keys scroll up and down.

I checked out Ubuntu Forums. Found several different directions, all of which head off in different directions. Anybody found a fairly straightforward way to make various keys do what you want them to?

 

I don't have a straightforward answer... but... There are a number of ways to do it, step 1 is to figure out how they're handled. I'm not sure how it is for Jaunty but in Debian Sid for my ASUS (not Acer) most of the hotkeys are handled thru HAL (hald). Some are handled by a kernel module that I had to modify to get some of the keys to work (this should hopefully not happen in your case).

Make sure acer_wmi is loaded:

Code:

sudo modprobe acer_wmi

You can monitor hal with (stop with Ctrl+C):

Code:

sudo lshal -m

Press the keys and you should see a response. If not try xev and see if they show up there.

If you get no response from anything you'll have to dig a bit deeper. Edit: Also see this:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Hotkeys/Architecture#line-62

The hotkeys that do show up should be able to be bound through the Keyboard Shortcuts preferences.

Hope this helps.

Some useful links:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Hotkeys/Architecture
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Hotkeys