[juneau-lug] Surplus Keyboards

  • From: James Zuelow <e5z8652@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: JLUG <juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 20:23:27 -0800

The last few times that I've been at surplus, I found some quality keyboards.  
These have good crisp keys, with just the right give to them.  A big plus is 
that they do not have those Windows Start & Menu keys!

The problem is that they're not exactly a normal PS/2 keyboard (although they 
have a PS/2 plug).  They are actually dumb terminal keyboards for NCD 
terminals.  So if you try to use them in Linux with a US QWERTY keymap, the 
alphanumeric keys will work, but nothing else (i.e. no function keys, and 
nothing to the right of the Enter key including the directional arrows & 
keypad).

At first I thought they were broken keyboards, but I tried out showkey & found 
out that the keys are just sending different signals than a normal querty 
keyboard.  This weekend I'll be building a keymap for them just in case any of 
you has picked one of these keyboards up already, or wants a good keyboard w/o 
the Windows keys on it.  Building a keymap is pretty simple, you just need to 
run showkeys and list the keycode for each key.  Then build a map with a list 
of what is what.

The model number on the bottom of these keyboards reads "N-101MPS."  If you do 
a google on that you'll see the terminal they were used with, which sounds 
pretty cool.  However I've not seen the actual terminal at Surplus.  :(

Sadly, I think a lot of these keyboards will get thrown away when people pick 
them up with a computer, and then think that they are broken when a lot of the 
keys don't work.

Cheers,

James

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