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Abram Hindle's Blog, The Personal Blog Of Abram Hindle

Abram Hindle
abezblog@abez.ca

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    Wed, 30 Aug 2006

    Subject: Gmail admins need to get their act together
    Got this from gmail:

    Received-SPF: softfail (gmail.com: domain of transitioning iywhk@abez.ca does not designate 63.229.116.57 as permitted sender)

    Go look up SPF, it is a way of denying hosts from sending mail as you by allowing spam filters to filter based on a txt entry for your domain.

    Regardless on a softfailure gmail is sending me spam from people pretending to send mail from my domain. I've sent them emails complaining about this in the past but they've been ignored.

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    Subject: Multiple Keyboards and Linux
    I want a keyboard dedicated to a musical instrument. I want 300+ keys of musical control. I want keys for pitch, I want keys for sliders. I want options out the wazoo. Frankly Linux's automatic behaviour makes this difficult for me. Luckily with 2.6 their new input handling code seperates the keyboard out for me.

    I've been recently trying to get multiple keyboards providing me multiple input. There are a few ways one can do this:

    • You're going to have to read for /dev/input/event*. I recommend
    hacking evtest. output to the standard linux keyboard and if you use "kdb" in xorg as your driver they will all mirror each other. You can't do any keystrokes that your window manager likes etc. It is like using your normal keyboard but if you read directly from /dev/input/event* you'll get all the keypresses and the different keyboards. This means your main program in focus has to handle all the keyboard input :(.
    • Way 2: Let XORG handle it and disable the extra keyboards. Use the
    Keyboard input device "evdev" and use /dev/input/event0 as your keyboard (probably your main keyboard). You might have problems with keybindings (redo them). The problem with this method is that your VT in linux still is handling the other keyboards. So if you do a ctrl-c you're probably going to kill X. At least this way you can just read the devices. If you use a builtin keyboard or a ps/2 keyboard you can try and disable the linux usbkbd driver and see if that saves you from ctrl-cing your xorg session. Get a list of your special keyboards that you want to disable from normal input and edit the driver blacklist. Tell it to ignore (HID_QUIRK_IGNORE) your devices. I think this is probably the most convienant way actually or just don't load usbkeybd at all. If you do this make sure you have network access to your machine just in case you lose all keyboard input in some accident (it is possible).
    • Way 4: Assign your other keyboards to a seperate virtual terminal. I
    don't know how to do this.

    Everytime you'll have to parse the event devices. Good things to search for in google to help you out "multi seat linux". You might need a ruby kernel.

    I'm not done yet so I think I'm going to hack usbkdb and tell it to ignore the USB keyboards I have. I have not verified that it'll still work as an event device (I sure hope so).

    abram

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