Acer 5920G media touch buttons

Question

Hello there,
I am using Acer Aspire 5920G notebook. There are touch sensitive media (play, pause, etc) buttons on my keyboard [0]. However, on linux, they behave as if they are mouse buttons. I am using a usb mouse with 9 buttons. And I want to use these touch sensitive buttons as multimedia buttons. To configure them with xbindkeys or something similar, I need to set these buttons' button numbers as different from my default mouse buttons. Input device block of these buttons is /dev/input/event4, is it possible to configure this device's buttons numbers? Here is these buttons' xev outputs:
ButtonPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 1397192, (160,8), root:(1229,313),
state 0x0, button 4, same_screen YES
ButtonRelease event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 1397252, (160,8), root:(1229,313),
state 0x800, button 4, same_screen YES
ButtonPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 1397484, (160,8), root:(1229,313),
state 0x0, button 5, same_screen YES
ButtonRelease event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 1397569, (160,8), root:(1229,313),
state 0x1000, button 5, same_screen YES
ButtonPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 1397807, (160,8), root:(1229,313),
state 0x0, button 6, same_screen YES
ButtonRelease event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 1397897, (160,8), root:(1229,313),
state 0x0, button 6, same_screen YES
ButtonPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 1398105, (160,8), root:(1229,313),
state 0x0, button 7, same_screen YES
ButtonRelease event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 1398185, (160,8), root:(1229,313),
state 0x0, button 7, same_screen YES
[0]: http://tech2.in.com/media/images/2008/F … 5920_7.jpg

Answer 1

Hi there, I solved this problem long time ago, but I didn't post anything because I'm a little bit lazy xD
I basically reached the same place as you, getting a different mapping with xinput. The difference is that I'm using xbindkeys to map the "buttons" as mediaKeys. My solution was working fine, but unfortunately in recent changes (kernel version? udev??) it seems the mediakeys has a different id on each start. So I decided to do a very nice script I'm going to share with you
Here is the multimedia.sh script:
#!/bin/bash
# Get the ids for touchpad devices
ids=`xinput --list | sed -ne 's/^.*Synaptics TouchPad.*id=\(.*\)\t.*$/\1/p'`
for id in `echo $ids`
do
res=`xinput --list-props $id | sed -ne 's/^.*Resolution.*:\t\(.*\)/\1/p'`
# Resolution property for media touchpad is "1, 1"
if [ "$res" = "1, 1" ]; then
id_mm=$id
fi
done
# Switch off Repeat mode for multimedia keyboard
prop_id=`xinput --list-props $id_mm | sed -ne 's/^.*Repeat (\(.*\)).*$/\1/p'`
xinput --set-prop $id_mm $prop_id 0 0
# set a different mapping
xinput --set-button-map $id_mm 0 0 0 9 10 11 12
# activate xbindkeys
xbindkeys
Paste it in a .sh, give it chmod +x and place it in ~/.kde4/Autostart to start it every boot.
You must install xbindkeys (and xte if it's not installed, for the next step)
Next code are the bindings for xbindkeys, in ~/.xbindkeysrc
"xte 'key XF86AudioPlay'"
b:9
"xte 'key XF86AudioStop'"
b:10
"xte 'key XF86AudioPrev'"
b:11
"xte 'key XF86AudioNext'"
b:12
This way, the multimedia keys are mapped as real multimedia keys, I think amarok is configured to work with multimedia keys by default
Hope this helps And sorry for not having it shared before... enjoy!