[tlug] Keyboard mappings

[Dave M G <martin@example.com>]

TLUG,

Despite the recent troubles I had in going from Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.10, my 
Ubuntu machine is doing really well these days. With the printer now 
running smoothly, I can say without reservation that my Linux machine 
does everything my Windows machine ever did.

Well, actually I could go on and on with a scorecard comparison between 
the two operating systems, and Mac as well, but I won't. The point is 
that despite a couple of very minor differences, I think Ubuntu is 
giving me a much better user experience than Windows did.

Anyway, now I'm in the mood to try and solve some minor stuff that's 
been kind of bugging me for a while. The little issues that are just too 
unimportant when faced with things like setting up MySQL and getting the 
printer to work.

The first of these is some custom key mapping on the keyboard.

My keyboard has three keys that, so far as I know, aren't standard on 
every keyboard. One is "Sleep", one is "Wake Up/WWW", and the other is 
"Power".

I was surprised to discover a while back that they actually do pretty 
much what they say. Chalk one up for the people who make the keyboard 
drivers.

But I tend not to use them, because they don't behave quite how I'd hope.

The "Sleep" button seems to initiate a locked mode of the screen saver, 
so that if I press "Wake Up", I have to enter in a password.

I can see how some might dig this kind of security setting, but I really 
don't need it, and especially now for reasons to do with my MythTV 
usage, it would be ideal to have these buttons simply initiate these 
commands (which were given to me here on this list in another thread):

"Sleep" = xset dpms force off

"Wake up" = xset dpms force on

Of course, I went on the web to see how to go about this. I kind of 
thought there might be a UI interface for mapping keys to inputs.

No such luck, though. In "System->Preferences->Keyboard" I can change 
from one standard layout to another, but I can't edit specific keys.

Right below "Keyboard" on the Preferences menu is "Keyboard Shortcuts". 
This allows some mapping of various shortcuts to preset actions. But I 
can neither enter in a new non-standard key, nor enter in a new command.

It seems that there is some setting thing called "xmodmap" involved. 
However, this web site I read about it scares me by promising that it's 
complicated, and then delivers on that promise:
http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/X11/xmodmap.html

I thought I was almost saved by a little utility called "xkeycaps", but 
in none of the keyboard layouts that are included include the three keys 
that I want to get access to.

Hmm... Is this maybe going a little too deep?

Is there a straightforward way to access these two keys to edit what 
they do that I haven't discovered yet? Or is this something that is over 
my head?

Any advice or information much appreciated.

ï--
Dave M G
Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft
Kernel 2.6.17.7
Pentium D Dual Core Processor
PHP 5, MySQL 5, Apache 2