Microsoft Keyboard

Julio Batista Silva

Last updated on Jul 4, 2011 2 min read Hardware, Tutorial

Keyboard

I bought a wireless keyboard Microsoft 6000 v3.0, which has several multimedia keys and follows the British standard layout.

Getting used to the UK layout is not a big issue, my only complaint is the position of the ESC key, the most used key in Vim, which is too far away.

Although it worked reasonably well out of the box, even on the boot screen, we can make it work even better.

On Windows

Download and install IntelliType: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/d/wireless-keyboard-6000v3.0

After installation, everything will work very well, and we can even customize the key functions using the program that comes with the driver.

On Linux

Since the laptop keyboard is American and the wireless keyboard is British, we can use setxkbmap to specify the layout for each keyboard separately. I found out the device IDs of the keyboards through trial and error (since the output of xinput -list doesn’t match).

Add the following lines to .xinitrc to make the settings permanent:

##############    Keyboard Stuff    ##############
setxkbmap -device 13 -model acer_laptop -layout us -variant intl
setxkbmap -device 11 -model pc105 -layout gb -variant intl

C-Cedilla

The US layout allows typing ç using AltGr + ,, but in the UK layout, the standard is Alt + G or AltGR + = + c (as AltGR + = is the cedilla).

julio@julio-acer ~> xmodmap -pk | grep cedilla
     21         0x003d (equal)  0x002b (plus)   0x003d (equal)  0x002b (plus)       0xfe5b (dead_cedilla)   0xfe5c (dead_ogonek)

We can remap the keyboard to achieve a simpler configuration using xmodmap.

Edit the ~/.xmodmap_uk and add the line:

keycode  54 = c C c C ccedilla Ccedilla

Then use the command to activate the new mappings:

julio@julio-acer ~> xmodmap ~/.xmodmap_uk

The favorite and zoom keys are not even detected in Linux, I am still looking for a solution for that. Multimedia keys can be configured using xbindkeys.

Increasing the signal range

http://www.volunteerlabrat.com/default.html?goto=keyboardhack.html