Like many others, I've bought an Aluminium Keyboard for its cool style the smooth typing experience it provides. Mine is a wired version, ISO variant (international, 110-keys). It's not working 100% out-of-the-box under Linux, so this post explains what I did to make it happen:

• Supporting the additional keys (F13..F19) and geometry (physical layout) under X.org

• Making the keyboard auto-configured at X.org startup. No need to mess with xorg.conf!

But wait, there's more. If you're accustomed to PC keyboards, you really need those ones too:

• Making this fn key located on top of the delete key behave like a regular PC keyboard: Insert!

• Making multimedia keys output Fxx symbols by default

• Making F13..F15 behave like those charmingly obsolete Scroll Lock..Print Screen keys

• Keeping the multimedia keys accessible when the fn key is remapped to Insert

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A few weeks ago, I finally upgraded my iPhone to firwmare 2.2.1. It was actually an utterly painless operation, thanks to the amazing toolchain.sh by the guys from iphonedevlinux.

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As promised earlier, I've packaged an obligatory example of how to use the iPhone port of libmikmod which I've talked about recently. Go grab this tarball which implements a very simple "Hello World!":

• It shows how to play a module within a UIKit application. This is an adaptation of the skeleton program found in MikMod Documentation.

• It shows how to use the higher level sound API Celestial to control mikmod output. For instance, how to react to volume change events when iPhone buttons are pressed.

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I've always been a big fan of old skool computer music, like chiptunes or demoscene music. Perhaps because they remind me the Good Old Days (tm) of my Amiga. Or perhaps for the same reason I like demoscene: real-time computer art! Because it's definitely cool, I've decided to port MikMod to the iPhone! We'll see later if it might be useful to someone else :)

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