I’m not quite clear why it would report this information over the USB bus when it’s just a keyboard, but nonetheless, I had to fiddle.ĭmesg says: input: Microsoft Microsoft® Digital Media Keyboard 3000 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.0/usb5/5-1/5-1:1.0/input/input2

It turns out that the keyboard says it’s a mouse, a joystick, and a keyboard all at once. There are 5 buttons labelled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 that don’t expose themselves to the Linux kernel. Those are easy to fix, and I’ll provide more information below. Most things are easily remapped as regular keys, except for the “zoom” buttons. Of course, I ended up remapping things to what the icons might generally represent anyway: the headphones button switches between headphone/speaker output, the volume up/down/mute do what you think, and the zoom buttons utilize Compiz’s enhanced desktop zoom feature. What I bought it for, though, were the extra keys, which in Windows might be tied to some specific function, but in Linux, can be remapped to your heart’s content. There is a slight ergonomic depth to them that feels far better than most other keyboards I have owned. Entirely aware that it was a Microsoft product, I expected some degree of fiddling to get it to work with my machine running a Linux 2.6.38 kernel on Ubuntu 11.04.

Microsoft digital keyboard 3000