I wonder if anyone could shed some light on this minor problem I have:
I'm using Cygwin/X as my X client for several linux boxes at work.
Everything's working fine (after some tweaking), but there is one small
thing I find very annoying:
The multimedia keys on my keyboard generate keypresses as though they
were normal keys. Specifically, Play/Pause generates a 'g', volume up
generates 'c', volume down generates 'b', and mute generates 'd'. The
keyboard is a logitech Internet 350. As I listen to music all day to
keep my sanity, and occasionally need to alter the volume or stop or
mute the track to join in a conversation in the office (or stop driving
other people mad with my relentless beats!), I often find these
keypresses being entered into whatever program I'm working on. Not
ideal.
I used xev to find out what keycodes were being generated by these keys,
and by the keys the output would suggest is being pressed, ie. g, c, b,
and d, expecting to find different keycodes perhaps being mapped to the
same keysyms, so I could alter .Xmodmap to assign them to XF86Play, etc.
But I found that they were exactly the same, as if Cygwin was
interpreting them as the same keys at some very basic level, whereas
Windows can tell the difference between pressing g (outputs a 'g') and
pressing Play/Pause (it plays or pauses the current track in my media
player). Here is the output from xev when pressing Play/Pause, then g:
They both output 'keycode 42 (keysym 0x67, g)'. I tried various settings
in the arguments to XWin, to try to enable multimedia keys, and set the
model of my keyboard and layout correctly:
%RUN% XWin -multiwindow -clipboard -silent-dup-error -xkbmodel
logitech_base
REM -xkbvariant extd
REM -xkbmodel logii350
REM -xkblayout gb
but none of these made any positive difference, in fact one of them (I
can't remember which), actually disabled some other keys (e.g. the arrow
keys).
This behaviour doesn't happen in non-X Cygwin. I tried using Xming get
some ideas as suggested in this similar-looking post
http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin-xfree/2004-12/msg00249.html
('Xming.exe :1 -multiwindow -logverbose 10'), and got no useful messages
about the keyboard.
Has anyone got a clue what's going on? Hope someone can help.