mkeys

mkeys is a modular programmable user input control daemon, i.e. it is a program, which performs some actions when user presses keys on a keyboard (and some modern keyboards have them much more then 104), rotates mouse wheel, presses mouse buttons, etc. User can program it to run various applications, change volume, light keyboard LEDs and to dynamically change its behavior.

mkeys uses Linux input subsystem to get events from keyboard and mouse. For Linux kernels up to 2.4 series it means that it supports USB devices only. If you own such a device, and are ready to (perhaps) make some additional steps nesessary to get Linux input subsystem running on your machine (not that hard, though), you can give it a try. However, most Linux kernels that come with modern Linux distros have it compiled as a module, so you only have to load a module and make device files using mknod.

If you do not want to mess with all this stuff, or simply do not have a USB device, there is other way for you:

Because of mkeys's modular nature, many things in it are implemented in modules. User input through Linux input subsystem is also implemented that way. As you can guess, it is not a hard thing to implement a module that will handle user input the old way, or even maintain any device that you may use for input. Or you can wait some time, until another guy do it for you (or maybe I will do it by myself some day). I did not do this by myself because I do not have any devices now that are not on USB (and I am lazy :).

If you are ready, here are some links:

And thank you for paying atttention. I hope you will find mkeys useful.