Acer TravelMate 4001WLMi

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The notebook has several 'special' keys on the keyboard that are not bound to key codes, and hence are useless until bound. I wrote a small start-up script (to be used with the SysV init) to assign key codes to all the missing keys. On Fedora Core, it is located in /etc/rc.d/init.d/acerkeys, and then added to the startup as a normal service.

Note that there is a long standing bug in X that causes the X server to assign different events to keys than the associated key code. For example, the Euro key is assigned key code 89, but X will receive 211. It took some experimenting to get the values right.

When the script is executed, all TravelMate keys are either generating a key event, or an ACPI event. Both events can be tracked and reacted to.

I found two programs very useful: xbindkeys and on-screen display. For example, when I hit Fn + F1, I get an on-screen display of the current system status like CPU state, power save, frequency, and so on.

Without further explanation I provide:

xosd, a helper script for on-screen display.
.xbindkeysrc, the key bindings for xbindkeys that I use.
xbk_aumix, a helper script for volume control (perl version).
xbk_aumix, a helper script for volume control (obsolete shell version).
xbk_sysinfo. a helper perl script for system information.

ACPI events can be handled using the standard acpid daemon.