The buttons at the top of multimedia keyboads can be useful to save you time and keep your hands on the keyboard rather than on the much slower mouse. These special keys are not normally useable after a VL install. You need to:
1) If you use KDE as your desktop environment:
KDE Control Center, Regional and Accessibility, Keyboard Model, choose the appropriate keyboard, restart KDE by logging out.
2) If you use Gnome:
System, Preferences, Keyboard, Layouts, Keyboard Model, choose the appropriate keyboard, restart Gnome by logging out.
3) For almost any other window manager:
Download, install and configure a keyboard capture program such as xbindkeys (
http://hocwp.free.fr/xbindkeys/xbindkeys.html ) or lineak (
http://lineak.sourceforge.net/index.php?nav=keyboards ). The install and configuring of such software is quite straightforward and the website documentation is good so I will not repeat it here. You must ensure that your startup file for your window manager launches these programs during window manager boot-up.
I recommend lineakd over xbindkeys for the newbie. Geeks might prefer the latter.
