Last weekend my wife purchased her self a new USB Wireless keyboard. A Typhoon Media Center Desktop Art-No.40691. She is a big WinXP fan, and the keyboard box noted Win98, WinXP and Vista support. But no mention of Linux. Of course she went for the least expensive she could find, and paid no heed to Linux compatibility. Sometimes I think she does this as a challenge to me, to see if I can get new hardware working with Linux.
… anyway, the keyboard initially failed with MS-Windows, and only worked with MS-Windows after she installed some custom drivers. It took her about 45 minutes of messing around to get it to work.
Early today I tried booting to openSUSE-10.3 on her PC. The keyboard simply would not respond at the Grub Menu, and the PC went to the default grub setting (WinXP) every boot. So after a few attempts, I rebooted to the BIOS, changed the USB mode to legacy, and the keyboard then worked with the grub menu. I pressed 3 to boot Linux to run level 3, and then ran yast to select a USB trackball setting for the trackball on the wireless keyboard. I then tried run level 5 (KDE) and keyboard and mouse worked. One quirk of the keyboard with KDE, is I have to press the < nums lock > key two to three times every boot, in order to get proper function out of the keyboard. A few attempts to change default KDE settings on < nums lock > made no difference.
Anyway, thats not a big thing. Total time spent on Linux to get it running … About 35 minutes.
However the next task could be rather difficult. The wife also purchased a DLA-401 Digital Note Recorder (sort of a tablet for a pen) and she has challenged me to get that running under Linux. … I’m not confident I am up to that challenge, especially since a large portion of the support for that device happens to be in the Thai language. :eek: