The graphics chip of the Armada is an Ati Rage LT Pro with 8 MB RAM, which uses the Mach64 driver, which is compiled into your kernel if you use my .config.
You can download my xorg.conf from the section called “Files” and put it in /etc/X11/ to configure it. Unless you have an Armada with hardware I'm unaware of, there shouldn't be any problems.
The graphics card support GLX. Install opt/mesa3d and its dependencies like this:
# prt-get depinst mesa3d
Download my glx.conf and put it in /etc/X11/ as well. It is not really spectacular (no direct rendering for instance), but still nice for things like viewing VRML/X3D web pages.
The Armada E500 has four hotkeys which don't have names but iconic pictures near them. If you open a terminal, become root and do
# tail -f /var/log/messages
you can see things like this when you press any of these buttons:
May 30 14:02:15 bender kernel: atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0xa3 on isa0060/serio0). May 30 14:02:15 bender kernel: atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e023 <keycode>' to make it known. May 30 14:02:15 bender kernel: atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0xa3 on isa0060/serio0). May 30 14:02:15 bender kernel: atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e023 <keycode>' to make it known.
Setkeycodes can bind a scancode (like e023) to keycodes, which can be used by X. Any unused keycode between 0 and 255 can be used. To find out which keycodes are used, you do:
# getkeycodes
On my Armada, the codes of these buttons are e023, e01f, e01a and e01e. To give them keycodes I do:
# setkeycodes e023 200 e01f 201 e01a 202 e01e 203
Put this line in /etc/rc.local to execute it automatically during boot. So now that they are known to the kernel, X can catch them. In a terminal, start the Event Tester:
# xev
If you press any of the hotkeys, you can see that KeyPress events are generated. The keycodes here are X11 keycodes, which differ from kernel keycodes. In my case, they are 168, 169, 171 and 172. The next step is to map them to key symbols, using xmodmap:
# xmodmap -e 'keycode 168=XF86News'
The symbols that you can use are defined in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB. I use XF86News, XF86HomePage, XF86Search and XF86Mail. You can put these in a file, called ~/.Xmodmap with these lines:
keycode 168=XF86News keycode 169=XF86HomePage keycode 171=XF86Search keycode 172=XF86Mail
When you do
# xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap
They are all configured at once. Put this line in whatever script starts your X session to make it run each time you login. In KDE you put it in a script that you place in ~/.kde/Autostart/. Now you can use whatever tool your window manager provides to bind these to actual actions. In KDE, you can configure things in the Control Center under -> , where you will find that XF86HomePage is by default tied to the action Home.
To adjust the brightness of your screen you can install m300bl from my repository. It comes with a readme that explains how best to integrate it into KDE. To be able to use it as a regular user, which would make sense, you have to setuid /usr/bin/m300bl (the program that allows you to set the brightness).