5Jul/100
Keyboard Hotkeys with Debian Lenny
Here are some notes on assigning functions to those special keys that come on so many keyboards. My Gateway SK-9920 has 12 of these hotkeys: volume up, down, and mute; play, stop, next, and last track; internet, help, mail, shopping cart (?), and back (presumably). I don't even know what the creators of this keyboard envisioned for the "shopping cart" key. Often these keys aren't recognized out-of-the-box in Windows, much less in Linux.
Like usual, there are almost certainly specific GNOME or KDE tools to accomplish this goal. Since I'm not running those, however, I'll stick to tools available in almost any X.Org environment (I happen to be using Ratpoison).