Apple bluetooth keyboard

Apple bluetooth keyboard

[Phil Endecott]

Dear Experts,

I have the bluetooth version of the Apple aluminium keyboard and I'm 
having trouble getting it to work right.

I'm running 2.6.25 and I can see that it has some quirks for these 
keyboards that should do some of the things that I want.  
(Specifically, HID_QUIRK_APPLE_ISO_KEYBOARD and 
HID_QUIRK_APPLE_HAS_FN.)  But it looks as if they're keyed on the USB 
vendor/product IDs, which presumably don't match my bluetooth device.

Can someone please explain how input quirks should be applied to 
bluetooth devices?

Thanks,  Phil.

Re: Apple bluetooth keyboard

[Phil Endecott]

Phil Endecott wrote:
> I have the bluetooth version of the Apple aluminium keyboard and I'm 
> having trouble getting it to work right.
>
> I'm running 2.6.25 and I can see that it has some quirks for these 
> keyboards that should do some of the things that I want.  
> (Specifically, HID_QUIRK_APPLE_ISO_KEYBOARD and 
> HID_QUIRK_APPLE_HAS_FN.)  But it looks as if they're keyed on the USB 
> vendor/product IDs, which presumably don't match my bluetooth device.
>
> Can someone please explain how input quirks should be applied to 
> bluetooth devices?

I believe I've worked this out now.  In summary, this entry:

/* Apple Bluetooth alu ISO keyboard */
{ 0x05ac, 0x022d, HID_QUIRK_APPLE_HAS_FN | HID_QUIRK_APPLE_ISO_KEYBOARD },

and presumably these untested ones:

/* Apple bluetooth alu ANSI keyboard */
{ 0x05ac, 0x022c, HID_QUIRK_APPLE_HAS_FN },
/* Apple bluetooth alu JIS keyboard */
{ 0x05ac, 0x022e, HID_QUIRK_APPLE_HAS_FN },

need to be added to hidp_blacklist in net/bluetooth/hidp/core.c; but I 
note that this moved to drivers/hid/hid-apple.c in Jiri Slaby's patch 
"HID: move apple quirks" posted here on 2008-05-16.  (I'm not posting 
this as a proper patch because of this move; I haven't applied Jiri's 
patches to my 2.6.25 tree and I don't think it would be useful to post 
a patch that would conflict with them.  Jiri, presumably you'll have no 
trouble adding those entries to your tree, right?)

I'm still unsure how all of this works though.  Those are USB vendor 
and product IDs.  Does bluetooth "borrow" the same scheme of 
vendor/product IDs that USB uses?  I got the IDs from the table in 
drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-quirks.c, but I can't see any way to get find 
them from my hardware; "hcitool info" doesn't report them.  Were the 
entries in drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-quirks.c actually useful before?  
Perhaps they would be applied if you had a bluetooth dongle in "HID 
proxy" mode.  If bluetooth devices do all use USB vendor/product IDs, 
maye the better solution is to look them up in a single table rather 
than splitting it into separate parts for "real" USB devices and 
bluetooth devices.  Hmm, maybe that's what Jiri's patches from 
2008-05-16 are doing....

Anyway, I now have things like home/end/pgup/pgdown and the keys to the 
left of 1 and Z doing the right thing, which is great.  There are a 
couple more things I'd like to change though; does anyone have any 
opinions on either of these:

- I have no delete key, so I can't type ctrl-alt-del!  (I have to keep 
another keyboard plugged in just for this!)  I'd like to use the eject 
key, which is immediately above the backspace key, for this.  (What do 
Mac users do?)

- The FN key and the left Ctrl key are the same size and the keycaps 
can easily be exchanged.  The order of these keys is often something 
that people complain about, e.g. if they're used to pressing the 
bottom-left key on their desktop keyboard for ctrl but now find that it 
isn't.  Often there is nothing that can be done about this because the 
logic for the FN key is inside the keyboard and not fixable in 
software, but in the case of this keyboard I believe it could be 
changed in the kernel.  Actually I'm not too bothered about it because 
I use caps lock as ctrl, but maybe other people would consider it a 
useful feature.


Cheers,  Phil.

Re: Apple bluetooth keyboard

[Phil Endecott]

Phil Endecott wrote:
> - I have no delete key, so I can't type ctrl-alt-del!  (I have to keep 
> another keyboard plugged in just for this!)  I'd like to use the eject 
> key, which is immediately above the backspace key, for this.

I eventually discovered that loadkeys can make any key combination 
trigger the ctrl-alt-del action without any kernel changes:

keycode 161 = Remove
         Control Alt keycode 161 = Boot

This also made me wonder why HID_QUIRK_APPLE_HAS_FN has been 
implemented in the kernel, rather than in custom keymaps.  If it were 
in custom keymaps then it would be easier for a user to:
> - The FN key and the left Ctrl key are the same size and the keycaps 
> can easily be exchanged. The order of these keys is often something 
> that people complain about, e.g. if they're used to pressing 
> the bottom-left key on their desktop keyboard for ctrl but now find 
> that it isn't. Often there is nothing that can be done about this 
> because the logic for the FN key is inside the keyboard and not 
> fixable in software, but in the case of this keyboard I believe it 
> could be changed

I have written some of this up for the benefit of anyone else trying to 
get this device working properly: 
http://chezphil.org/apple-alu-bluetooth-kb-linux/ - hopefully the 
search engines will find that and the next users will waste less time 
on it.

Phil.