Xubuntu Geek

On a previous article I wrote about using the Xbox 360 controller as a mouse. The --mouse option is actually a shortcut for a custom button configuration. You can map any button on the controller to any key/combination. In this article I'll layout the basics. Further information can be obtained in the references. There are two ways of providing a custom mapping: Command line options: use ui-buttonmap to map a button and use ui-axismap to map a axis. The syntax consists of assigning a button name to a symbol. Example: ui-buttonmap x=XK_Tab,a=XK_Control_L+XK_a ui-axismap y2=XK_plus:XK_minus . This will map "X" as "Tab", "A" as "Super+a" and the right stick up is "+" and right stick down is "-". Configuration file: use config to provide the path for a configuration file. The config file has a ini format. Use the sections ui-buttonmap and ui-axismap for configuring the mappings. You can...

I had a problem with a keyboard: the period key wasn't working and it was a hardware problem. The period key is important! So what now? Realizing that there were a couple of keys that I almost never used, I thought that remapping one of those keys was a good idea. Remapping can be accomplished using xmodmap command with the following syntax: xmodmap -e "keysym KEYSYMNAME = KEYSYMNAME ..." KEYSYMNAME is something like: period, delete, equal, a, b, c. When in doubt, the xev can be used to find the correct symbol's name. Example In my case, I was trying to remap the Guillemet (« or ») key to the Period key, so that it would be used to produce a period and a colon. On a terminal window I ran this: xmodmap -e "keysym guillemotleft = period colon" The colon will be produced when using the Shift key. One more thing, please take in consideration that I'm using a keyboard with Portuguese layout, so this solution might not make sense to...