I don't want my IR handset to act like a keyboard

[Tony Houghton]

On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:02:32 +0100
Tino Keitel <tino.keitel+xorg at tikei.de> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 18:04:35 +0000, Tony Houghton wrote:
> > I've got a DVB card with an IR controller which appears as an input
> > device. I want my applications to read the input device directly, not as
> > a keyboard. Among other reasons, it's because I want to use the "OK"
> > button while mplayer is running, but it generates an "Enter" keypress
> > which mplayer interprets as "please quit".
> 
> You can use lirc to use the event device of the IR receiver and the
> devinput driver in lirc to define what actions you want for keypresses.
> 
> There is also a tool called inputlirc, which acts like an lirc daemon
> but is limited to input devices that send key events, like it's the
> case in your setup.

My problem isn't that I don't know how to make use of the events from
/dev/input/..., either via (input)lirc or directly reading the device.
The problem is that as well as those events, which I do want, I get X
keyboard events as well, which I don't want. One solution would be to
not use the devinput events after all and reconfigure my application to
recognise the keycodes from the X events, but this means more hassle to
prevent problems like the one with mplayer I detailed above.

ISTR you can put something in xorg.conf to make it grab devices so other
applications can't use them, but I seem to need it to be the other way
round. 

> Maybe you can also change the key events using the input-utils package.

That could be useful. It might cure the shutdown problem as well as the
mplayer one.

-- 
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk