[NBLUG/talk] FC4 ppc iBook - External USB keyboard (sort of)

Andrew argonaut at gmx.co.uk
Fri Mar 24 20:34:31 PST 2006


Dave Sisley wrote on Fri, 24 Mar 2006 18:34:11 -0800:

> Hmmm... Thanks for the responses, guys.  I'll have to do some
> more research, but I'm wondering if there's something I need to
> tweak in FC4 on the ibook to make it accept input from the
> scanner?  I was  hoping it would just think there was a
> keyboard there and suck up the barcode.  I'd have thought FC4
> would just think that I had attached an external keyboard, no?

Well, I can't tell you what to tweak, but a tool that might help
a bit as you sort things out is xev. It's a part of X, so it's
already installed. When you fire it up, you'll get a terminal
window and a smaller white window. As you move the mouse around,
click the mouse buttons, and type on the keyboard, the console
window will report on every event that X sees. You can use this
to see just what kind of input X is getting from the scanner, or
if there is any input at all. For example, if you scan a barcode
which should be rendered as "54321", does xev report a keypress
event for the "5" key on the keyboard, followed by a keyrelease
event for that key, and then a keypress event for the "4" key and
it's subsequent keyrelease event, etc, etc? Or do you instead see
garbage? Nothing? It's one step to figuring out what's going on
(or not) with your scanner.

Good luck.

A.



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