[maemo-developers] Changing/Disabling the special button below the cursor pad

[From: David Weinehall]

On tis, 2009-07-07 at 02:20 +0200, ext Jey Han Lau wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> 2 quick questions:
> 1. What do you call that special button below the cursor pad? It's the 
> one that opens up the menu if pressed.

here's two buttons that open menus; the home button (symbol is a house
on the n800 and two overlapping boxes on the n810) and the menu button
(a menu both on the n800 and the n810).

> 2. Is it possible to detect that special button key press or disable its 
> functionality? Either through a program or universally.

Both buttons are possible to detect, but you cannot override the home
button from an application.

> The reason I am asking this is because we have developed a full screen 
> program and a user can exit the program by pressing that special key, 
> and we would like to disable it.

I suspect that the key you want to mask is the home-key.  This home menu
is global, and presses of the home key are signalled through D-Bus in
addition to the normal way, to avoid forcing all apps to implement their
own home-key menu handlers.

The signal is sent by mce, and the easiest way to disable it permanently
is to edit /etc/mce/mce.ini and remove "homekey;" from the Modules.
Note that this will affect all uses of the home key, so don't do this on
general purpose devices.

There might be more fine-grained ways to disable it, but none that I
know of.

Hope this helps.


Regards: David