It's been a year now since I published my support for Aluminium Keyboards. Since then, my XKB patches have been accepted in XKeyboardConfig 1.9, with a few modifications:

• The multimedia keys can always be accessed by combining Fxx with the 3rd level chooser (this was option alul3media in my original XKB patches)

• There is now a single XKB option alupckeys to emulate the behaviour of a PC keyboard, i.e. to enable PrintScreen, ScrollLock, SysReq and NumLock (options alupcfkeys and alupcnumlock in the original patches)

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I finally found the time to update my previous support for Aluminium Keyboard under Xorg, and take it to the Next Level (tm). The overall support is now much more polished. For you this means several things:

• I've implemented the XKB geometries of all variants of the long Aluminium Keyboard, be it ANSI (American), ISO (Internationnal) or JIS (Japanese)! And believe me, it's darned complicated to support JIS keyboard's dual layout without having access to the real hardware :D

• I've added support for base XKB rules, which means that the keyboard will now be properly configured on other OSes than Linux. I personally used OpenSolaris during my tests, but it should work equally well on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and all their cousins!

• The keyboard support is now aware of the system-wide keyboard settings as found in Debian or Fedora for example. If you configured your system to default to Dvorak layout, the support will use it automatically!

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