I’m the proud owner of a Cherry CyMotion Master Linux keyboard. It’s a great keyboard, and it has loads of extra buttons that come in really handy. Well they do, if you can install the driver software that controls them under Linux.

Clean Keyboard Hosted on Zooomr

I have a CD that came with the keyboard which includes a Fedora Core 4 RPM, a SUSE RPM and a .deb I think. Back when this machine was running FC5, the Fedora Core 4 RPM would load fine into the system and that way I could use the cool extra keys.

However, when I upgraded to Fedora Core 6, the FC4 RPM would no longer install (and it went into just a little bit of RPM hell).

It wasn’t until recently that I discovered that the source code for the key utility is actually GPL’ed and is available for download from the Cherry site (found on this page).

This basically solves the problem, as once you’ve got the source code, you can build it yourself and not depend on some dodgy semi-incompatible binary package.

For some stupid reason, they distribute it as a zip file, which means the original Unix permission structure isn’t preserved. This means that files that should be executable – like configure – don’t have the executable bit set. I got round this with the rather overkill, but working:

[code]$ chmod -R 777 keyman[/code]

I extracted the zip to a folder called keyman, by the way.

It lists these dependencies in the readme file:

* make
* gcc (the compiler collection)
* X11 development files
* QT (threaded version) + development files
* kde + development files
* libtool
* xerces + development files
* kernel header files (for inputdev plugin and input tunnel)
(usually installed under /usr/include/linux)

You’ll need to install them via your package manager and then you can run the install with:

[code]$ ./configure
$ make
$ su -c “make install”[/code]

After that, there is a rather nice KDE menu applet (I haven’t tried this at all with GNOME by the way) and you have key configurability. At last I can use all those extra keys!