Apple keyboard on FreeBSD

Recently I bought an iBook G4 just for fun and of course installed FreeBSD on it. Installation goes pretty smooth starting with 9.0: I've started with 9.0-BETA3 and later updated to 10-CURRENT. I used it as a toy mostly but on Thursday my main laptop (which also runs FreeBSD, but amd64/8-STABLE) died and I had to use iBook as my main system and some problems became noticable.

There are two annoying problems with Apple keyboards:

1. Function keys (F1, F2, ...) work as they supposed to work only when pressing them with FN key. I rely on virtual desktops a lot and I use Ctrl-Fx to switch between them, so you imagine how annoying is that to use Ctrl-Fn-Fx to switch a desktop.

2. Apple keyboard misses 'Insert' key completely, so you cannot use Ctrl-Insert for pasting, so it's extremely annoying also.

Fortunately, both problems could be easily solved.

Several days ago Nathan Whitehorn ⟨nwhitehorn@) committed a support for dev.akbd.%d.fn_keys_function_as_primary which allows you to configure F-keys behavior. In order to make the keys look as F1,F2,... without pressing FN, execute:

sysctl dev.akbd.0.fn_keys_function_as_primary=1

The Insert key problem could be solved on X level: I've used xmodmap (x11/xmodmap) to remap F11 to Insert, which is a good solution for me because I don't use F11 key and it's located quite close to a place where you'd expect to have 'Insert' key on a typical keyboard.

So I've created ~/.Xmodmap file:

keycode 95 = Insert

And added execution of "xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap" on X session start.

I'm not sure if F11 has keycode 95 on every Apple keyboard, it's easy to figure out keycode using xev (x11/xev).