Thursday, June 23, 2011

actkbd package for Debian/Ubuntu

Recently I became an owner of Thinkpad X120E laptop produced by Lenovo. The computer was supplied with no pre-installed OS so I deployed (unexpected decision, huh!) Debian GNU/Linux there. This time I decided not to use desktop "ready-to-use-out-of-the-box" environments like Gnome or KDE and give a try to build a DE I want from bricks.

The one of the tasks I have faced with is how to make ThinkPad X120E hotkeys work in Debian GNU/Linux in a uniform way - to have a single keybindings entry point; which should work in VT w/o X.org also. Some of the keys (like VolUp, VolDown, Suspend etc) can be successfully handled through acpid daemon but the rest ones (say enable/disable microphone or switch touchpad/trackpoint) can be with xbindkeys (or similar) application only.

After a short research I found an amazing application called actkbd -- a keyboard shortcut X.org independent daemon. Thanks for being dependent on evdev Linux interface actkbd allows to handle ACPI events as well. But unfortunately there have been no ready-to-use Debian (Ubuntu) package available on the Internet (*).

(*) Of course I could install it using "configure && make && make install" way but I did not want to transform my Debian GNU/Linux installation to Slackware or kind of :).

Hence I made actkbd Debian/Ubuntu package by myself. So you can download here already built actkbd package for Debian Wheezy/i386 or build it by yourself (using dpkg-buildpackage). I am not so experienced in applications debianizing but seems it works well. Please feel free to use it or even to push to Debian/Ubuntu repositories.
Sources of debian/* files are to be shared soon through my git repository.

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