geekhack
geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: Ville on Tue, 13 December 2011, 08:55:20
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Hello!
A forum for keyboard enthusiasts! What a relief! I’ve always had strong feelings about keyboards but have been feeling kind of lonely since all of my friends and colleges, no matter how nerdy, seem to be OK with their 10*€ pieces of crap.
I’ve been typing with Cherry, IBM, Keytronic, a 20-function key XT keyboard from Siemens/Nixdorf, Olivetti and a Nokia Data -branded ICL to name a few. I’ve finally settled to Sun Microsystems Type 6 USB as my primary keyboard, a PS/2 ICL as secondary and a DIN KeyTronic E03623QSV (I think this was called Keytronic 2000, “anti-static keyboard”) as a backup. I couldn’t be happier with the SUN keyboard. It has exactly the touch and feel I like and I hate it when I have to type with anything else. My worst fear is that someone spills something on it and I can’t fix it or find a replacement.
I’m still a little new to these different switches and such. Does anyone know what type of switches are used in SUN keyboards? And what would be the closest match with Cherry switches? How about the Nokia Data / ICL keyboards? They have very distinct touch, what type of switches they used to use?
One of my dreams would be getting the SUN keyboard extra keys (Help, Stop, Again, Props, Undo, Front, Copy, Open, Paste, Find, Cut, Mute, Volume +, Volume - and Sleep) to do something in Windows XP. I think it should be possible since it’s just a standard USB HID, they work on x86 Solaris and I can get them working on Linux with xmodmap or something—but i’ve had no luck. All the Windows keyboard remapping solutions I’ve tried fail to get a scan code from the special keys while I can get scan codes just fine on Linux with exactly the same hardware. (I’ve also found some of the Windows tools difficult to use so one of them might actually do the trick if I just knew how.)
It would also be nice to get the Compose Key working as SUN intended but I think that would require a special driver (it also works in x86 Solaris though).
Anyway, great to join an interesting community!