Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Apple Aluminium Keyboards with udev, Xorg server 1.9

It's been a year now since I published my support for Aluminium Keyboards. Since then, my XKB patches have been accepted in XKeyboardConfig 1.9, with a few modifications:

  • The multimedia keys can always be accessed by combining Fxx with the 3rd level chooser (this was option alul3media in my original XKB patches)
  • There is now a single XKB option alupckeys to emulate the behaviour of a PC keyboard, i.e. to enable PrintScreen, ScrollLock, SysReq and NumLock (options alupcfkeys and alupcnumlock in the original patches)

Meanwhile, Xorg server 1.9 went stable, becoming more and more pervasive. As far as input hotplugging is concerned, this is a major revision for it dropped HAL in favor of udev: input discovery is achieved via udev and XKB settings for devices are fetched from the udev database.

I have thus ported the support for the Aluminium Keyboards to udev. As before, a configuration file controls the XKB settings to apply, as well as the remapping of the "fn" key to "insert", if requested.