Cool toys and Linux

[Runaway1956]

Well - I've been playing with computers for decades now. Literally. The very first time I sat down in front of a "personal computer" was spring time of 1981. I've used a lot of different keyboards, but never went out of my way to actually PURCHASE a keyboard! I mean, every machine comes with one. When a machine dies, the keyboard survives in almost all cases. Keyboards just kind of accumulate. I've bought adapters to use old keyboards on new machines, but never actually BOUGHT A KEYBOARD!!

One thing that has been lacking on all my machines and keyboards, is some low level lighting to make the keyboard visible in low-light conditions.

Enter the idea of "gaming keyboards". There are a lot of clicky-keyboards on the market - but those would only get me in trouble with the wife. She HATES to hear me banging away at a noisy board. It's almost enough to cause a divorce!

Somehow, I stumbled over an advert for Gambias Ares keyboard. It's somewhat typical of a membrane board, but it has a lot of gaming features. Prominent among those features, are double-shot plastic backlit keys! WHOO-HOO! And, you get a mouse with it, for about fifty bucks!

I ordered one. Came in the mail, I plugged it in, and some of the keys didn't work. That sucks - linux support often does suck. *sigh*

A couple hours of googling, and I have a solution - someone created his own home-made driver for another brand of keyboard that uses the same hardware. So, I download, compile, install aziokbd driver - and it doesn't work, still.

Another hour or more of puzzling over the reason it doesn't work, and I stumble over another blog, suggesting that usbhid quirks need to be loaded with grub.

YAY! The stupid keyboard finally works!

Us Linux users often have to do a little extra work to enjoy the same cool stuff that Windows users take for granted.

[SaThaRiel]

Great to hear that you got another windows/mac only hardware working with linux I am a long term user too and i know that it is mostly a mess when it comes to "more-featured" hardware...still have some ongoing fights with usb wifi dongles and so on.
Some question came up:
- which distro are you using?
- for backling purposes - what was the url of the blog that finally worked
- do you still have to use the self-build driver? Will it work with DKMS?

Cheers and have fun with you new piece of hardware I will personally stick with my 105-key "cheap" usb keyboard. Not too much time to play around anyway.

[Runaway1956]

First question, disto,
guy@sparky:~$ inxi
CPU~Dual core AMD Opteron 165 (-MCP-) clocked at 1808 Mhz Kernel~3.19-3.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64 x86_64 Up~ Mem~1607.2/3139.4MB HDD~560.1GB(54.1% used) Procs~164 Client~Shell inxi~2.1.28

I was going to supply a direct link to Sparky E19, but it appears that he's moved the E19 ISO somewhere. There aren't a lot of people who love Enlightenment like I do.



Second question, source,

http://swoogan.blogspot.com/2014/09/...38839324953526

And, third, it appears that Colin, the author, just recenlty implemented DKMS, so I used it. It's just a matter of calling DKMS during installation.

Of course, the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray - when the 4.0 kernel makes it to Liquorix, I'll probably find that I made some error, and DKMS doesn't work.

[SaThaRiel]

Well, 4.0 might break some things. Talking about the linux kernel here, not Angband

As said before, i am always lucky when someone gets some properitary hardware working with linux

I used Enlightment with version 17 i think (was some beta back then - maybe 10 years ago?). It was nice but after a while i was tired of all the gimmicks and so on. Additionally i had to build it myself and had to use a complete build tree for it...was not a really good experience. But since i am a DE hopper i might end up using it again some day. At the moment i am using XFCE and Gnome 3. Basically those are the default wms for the distros i am using.

[Runaway1956]

I just updated to the latest Liquorix kernel today - and that will likely be my last kernel update for a little while. DKMS did work - the keyboard came through the update with everything functional.

I generally give major updates and upgrades several days, or even weeks, before implementing them on my own hardware. The first time I got burnt, was with a Windows XP update that just killed the system with certain AMD CPU's. I had one of those certain CPU's.

I think it was Linux Mint - not LMDE but the original Mint - that borked another machine. X wouldn't start after update, and it took several hours of work, before I gave up and reinstalled. Some of the newer distros such as GhostBSD have also given me problems at update.

Since I'm a distro hopper, it's no great catastrophe when the OS takes a dump, but it can be annoying. I prefer to install a new OS because I want to, not because the old OS went flaky.