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So I just got a pre-owned Acer 3003wlmi (I know, not great, but it was an "if you can fix the damn thing it's yours" arrangement), and I've made everything work for the most part, except ONE thing I miss from the Windows XP config:
Under the touchpad, between the Left and Right mouse buttons, there's a plus sign-shaped scroller, where i can scroll up, down, left and right, by default. This is great, but I do all my scrolling with the touchpad itself, so I'd like to remap these buttons to something useful (like web browser back/forward, volume up/down, stuff like that) but no matter how hard i search, i find no really helpful information on how to do it.
Anyone with any expertise?
FYI, it is a SYNAPTICS touchpad
ALSO
If anyone has any ideas about THIS, it would be appreciated:
All of my function keys work (Fn + [End] = Next Track, etc) EXCEPT for the Volume Control buttons.
Any idea why that might be?
Last edited by Kyle Carter (2009-09-17 16:02:31)
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First off, I would see if your touchpad scrollbuttons generate any response from Xorg. You can use xev to see if they are mapped by X at all. Your best bet might be to look through some how-to's on getting multimedia buttons to work in Linux, as I imagine the process would be similar for what you're trying to accomplish. The wiki has an entry on this here: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Extra_Keyboard_Keys.
If these buttons don't generate either scancodes or keycodes, they might be considered extra buttons on the mouse, which may work through xdotool, but I've never used that. Dunno.
I assume that you're using gnome / kde, since SOME of the buttons work. Getting the rest of them to work involves exactly the same process as described in the above wiki entry, though some of that might not be completely applicable if you're using a desktop environment.
((God I hope this makes sense. I feel like I've rambled.))
"Unix is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." (Dennis Ritchie)
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Okay, I must have worded that wrong a little bit. The buttons I'm referring to WORK, I would just like them to do something DIFFERENT. Right now they do Horizonatal Scroll, and I'd like them to do Browser Back/Forward. I fired up xev, and it says they are buttons 6 and 7 respectively, but I have no idea what to do with that, and the link you provided doesn't take me anywhere.
I'm using XFCE, and the only buttons that DON'T WORK on the keyboard are the Fn+Up/Down keys, which are supposed to control volume. Not a big deal, but annoying enough. They report as having scancodes 122 and 123 though.
Last edited by Kyle Carter (2009-09-17 05:37:27)
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Okay, as an update, I have made the back button thing work by going into about:config in firefox and setting:
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action = 2
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines = -1
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines = false
So now it's just a volume issue.
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Actually, I must have worded my response poorly (and now that I read it, I see what I said that wasn't right. I had just gotten off of work...)
If you use Gnome or KDE, try looking through their keyboard layout configuration section to see if you get the volume keys working with any of the Acer models. If you're using a WM and not a DE, checkout the wiki entry I listed above.
"Unix is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." (Dennis Ritchie)
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I'm not using either of those, I'm using XFCE, which isn't mentioned in the wiki, but I managed to get this to work by mapping those keys in the Keyboard config to "amixer -c 0 set Master 2dB+" and "amixer -c 0 set Master 2dB-"
Thanks
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