Razer BlackWidow Ultimate 2013 function keys

[Ishami]

So I use spotify as my music player, and when I'm in a game, (I'm a Linux gamer, with Wine) and even when I'm not in a game, I can't skip the song or pause the song without having to go directly to the app, because the fn+F7, fn+F6 and fn+F5 don't activate unless I'm on the app, it makes it complicated when I want to skip a song while doing something else. Would anyone know how I would set up the keys to work globally? I'm using the native Spotify linux client, latest version, on Mageia 3. (I just installed today, and I absolutely love it. i used to be a big mandriva fan.) I figured it'd belong in advanced support, because it doesn't seem like a simple thing to setup.

EDIT: It's like this on every distro I should include, since razer doesn't support Linux.. But I've found things to get the M1, M2, etc buttons working, but I can't get the thing needed called "cabal" downloaded, I can't seem to find it for Mageia.

[doktor5000]

So the keys themselves work? I'm not sure if that's possible to pass over to spotify directly if it doesn't have focus/foreground, maybe only via some control mechanism like dbus or so.

[Ishami]

Ah well. I ended up reinstalling windows until I can get an Nvidia card, my Radeon HD 7870 gives such poor OpenGL performance, I can't even play games in Wine, that are able to be played with Nvidia.

[doktor5000]

Did you install the fglrx driver? Have a look at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Setup_the_graphical_server but please use a different thread for that.

[Ishami]

Yeah I did, but it's well known in the linux world that FGLRX and AMD's support for linux is pretty poor. I'm not a novice user, I always install the proprietary drivers, it performs the same on every distro, every desktop environment. Even openbox, I get poor performance. It's just AMD not giving a crap about fixing things for Linux. Thanks for the response though.

[doktor5000]

Are you sure it's currently in use?

[Ishami]

Pretty sure whenever Play on linux reads both OpenGL 32 bit libraries, and 64 bit libraries, and fglrxinfo reads my card, it's in use.

[GlennsPref]

Hi, I have one of these kb's too.
BW-Ultimate rz-03 -0038 (it's old!)
I have noticed that when using amarok music player my control buttons work no matter if I can see it or not (6 desktops 3d-cube).

these control buttons> Fn+F1, F2, F3, F5-8 for volume and transport controls. I especially liked the pause button, so handy when the phone rings.

Now I'm using audacious music player because of amarok crashes (executing scripts???), the buttons don't work.

So, I too am interseted in getting this device to work globally, despite Razers dev.

Macros would be good too.

[Ishami]

I actually figured out it's just KDE not wanting to cooperate with the keyboard. If you use gnome or MATE, or XFCE, just bind F5 F6 and F7 to the media next, media previous, and play/pause functions in keybinds. Regardless of binding the keys in KDE, it will only work for Amarok.