Subforge

I finally made a decision and chose the Logitech Wave after reading about it with all the pros and cons. Yesterday it arrived and I am really satisfied with the layout and especially with the wave design, it really makes typing a bit more pleasent. Overall it's not as heavy as it looks and it's well manufactured.

The mini usb receiver is a bit bigger than something I would call mini and to connect mouse and keyboard you need to press the connect keys manually. After that both work properly.

Wave and linux¶

On the linux console no problems at all, but under xorg many keys didn't work like expected and I am not speaking of the multimedia keys. This is probably a fault of my xmodmap though. Generally almost all of the multimedia keys have keycodes that aren't in the range of the supported keycodes(0-255) of the kbd driver. After some goodling I found the suggestion to use the evdev driver for this, here is my config for mouse and keyboard:

Section "InputDevice" 
  Identifier  "Mouse1" 
  Driver      "evdev" 
  Option      "Device"            "/dev/input/by-path/pci-0000:00:04.0-usb-0:9:1.1-event-mouse" 
  Option      "ZAxisMapping"      "4 5" 
EndSection

Section "InputDevice" 
Identifier  "Keyboard0" 
 Driver  "evdev" 
 Option  "Device"      "/dev/input/by-path/pci-0000:00:04.0-usb-0:9:1.0-event-kbd" 
 Option  "XkbModel"    "evdev" 
 Option  "XkbLayout"   "de" 
 Option  "XkbVariant"  "nodeadkeys" 
 Option  "XkbOptions"  "ctrl:nocaps" 
 Option  "evBits"      "+1" 
 Option  "keyBits"     "~1-255 ~352-511" 
 Option  "Pass"        "3" 
EndSection

The devices need to be adjusted for your config, by-path is a bit more pleasent than just relying e.g. on event0. This can avoid trouble when you switch usb ports.

Multimedia keys¶

There are many multimedia keys on the keyboard, some of them work and some of them don't. Currently I am only using the keys to control mpd.

Here is my Xmodmap for this:

keycode 121 = XF86AudioMute
keycode 122 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
keycode 123 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume
keycode 165 = XF86AudioPrev
keycode 171 = XF86AudioNext
keycode 172 = XF86AudioPlay
keycode 174 = XF86AudioStop

You can use the keynames than in your config, like I don in my subtle:

1 grab "XF86AudioMute", "amixer set Master toggle" 
2 grab "XF86AudioRaiseVolume", "amixer set Master 2dB+" 
3 grab "XF86AudioLowerVolume", "amixer set Master 2dB-" 
4 grab "XF86AudioPlay", "mpc toggle" 
5 grab "XF86AudioStop", "mpc stop" 
6 grab "XF86AudioPrev", "mpc prev" 
7 grab "XF86AudioNext", "mpc next"