spurious keyboard messages in syslog with multimedia keyboard

[Mikel Ward]

Hi

On my system, I get messages such as these about every three or four seconds:
Apr 3 15:21:15 pepper kernel: atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e001 <keycode>' to make
it known.
Apr 3 15:21:18 pepper kernel: atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2,
code 0xd9 on isa0060/serio0).
Apr 3 15:21:18 pepper kernel: atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e059 <keycode>' to make
it known.
Apr 3 15:21:21 pepper kernel: atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2,
code 0xd9 on isa0060/serio0).

This is pretty annoying because it makes my logs large and more noisy.

Apparently my Microsoft Internet Keyboard is sending spurious keyboard events to
the system and atkbd doesn't recognise the scancodes.

According to the comment by "cartman" on this forum,
http://www.debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=126096, the problem also exists
under Debian. He implies that the two scancodes relate to power savings (e001
being wake and e059 being sleep/idle). I get them on my system regardless of
whether I'm pressing any keys at all, however I can often increase the frequency
of the e059 events by pressing the "Sleep" key above the numeric keypad.

To silence these, I issued:
setkeycodes e001 129
setkeycodes e059 217

I have seen a few other suggestions in forums, such as changing them to numbers
similar (but different from) those used by XFree86, yet these mappings are only
for the console, so there seems to be little point in doing that. Another
suggests mapping them to 254 and 255 because they are the last unused keycodes.
 I chose 129 and 217 because that's their inherent numeric value (e indicates
Escape which sets the 8th bit high, so e001 is 128 + 0x001 = 129, e059 is 128 +
0x59 = 217) and these keycodes are unused (at least on my Ubuntu Hoary system on
x86).

It would save a lot of hassle if this could be added to the console keyboard
mappings (or otherwise resolved) at the distribution or upstream level. :-)

[Mikel Ward (mikelward)]

This is a common annoyance and seems to affect many Linux distributions. It is
discussed in many forums, but nobody has offered a specific solution. Most
people discuss in general how to make multimedia keys work under X, but with
Hoary and the new X kbd driver, multimedia keys are working fine. The only
problem is these spurious events that do not correspond to key presses.

As far as I can tell, these events are actually ACPI power notifications. The
wireless keyboard is reporting its battery status.

Since there's nothing to handle these events under Linux at present, I ignore
them by mapping the scancodes to unassigned keycodes in my /etc/init.d/ scripts:
setkeycodes e059 120
setkeycodes e001 121

Please try to fix this at the distribution level for Breezy.

[Ben Collins (ben-collins)]

*** Bug 12034 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Ben Collins (ben-collins)]

This is supposedly fixed in breezy kernels.