esekeyd

ESE Key Daemon - multimedia keyboard driver for Linux

Getting started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine.

Building from source

Prerequisites

Compile kernel with event interface input support. Generic kernels should have this enabled by default.

If evdev was compiled as a module (probably the best choice) load the module with

sudo modprobe evdev

You may want to keep the default permissions for keyboard event devices. If you need to change anything, remember to set access correctly to prevent users from installing key loggers.

Downloading

Clone repository

git clone https://github.com/burghardt/esekeyd.git

Building

Compile program using the following commands

sh bootstrap
./configure
make

Installing

Optionally install program

sudo make install

Usage

There are three commands available: keytest, learnkeys and esekeyd.

Use keytest to test if additional "multimedia" keys of your keyboard are recognized. If so, create a skeleton configuration file

learnkeys ~/.config_file_name.conf

Edit this file to assign a command to each key that will be executed when the key is pressed.

Finally, run the key daemon and check that the commands for each key are executed.

esekeyd ~/.config_file_name.conf

You don't have to run it as root if you set the permissions correctly, if you need to do root things (like init 5) use sudo.

My config file is included in examples directory for reference.

Acknowledgments

This program was inspired by discussions about Funkey and 2.6 Linux kernels. I just read what Vojtech Pavlik thought about the Funkey patch and implemented what he has suggested.