Thursday, May 19, 2011

Support for Aluminium Keyboards packaged, code-named apple-kbd

After many episodes, the support for Apple Aluminium Keyboards is finally becoming user-friendly. All major distribs now ship a recent version of xkeyboard-config, so there is no need to mess with XKB patches anymore...

To complete the user experience, I'm happy to introduce you apple-kbd, the collection of helpful goodies you need for your Aluminium Keyboard under Linux. Here's what you'll get with this package:

Automatic keyboard detection under X
At boot time or when the keyboard is plugged in, apple-kbd auto-updates the system-wide XKB settings so that the X server sees the Aluminium Keyboard and enables all its keys and its geometry.
Key style preferences
apple-kbd lets you remap some of the keyboard's keys: you'll get back the Insert key, the antique Print, Scroll-Lock and Pause... You can also set the precedence of functions keys over multimedia keys.
User-friendly installation
Both auto-detect and configuration features are available in a single, easy to install package. If you're running Debian or Ubuntu, there's even a package for you which comes with interactive configuration thanks to debconf!