Hotkeys

Their explanation
The HotKeys daemon listens for the "special" hotkeys that you won't normally use on your Internet/Multimedia keyboards. The buttons perform their intended behaviors, such as volume up and down, mute the speaker, or launch applications. It has On-screen display (OSD) to show the volume, program that's being started, etc. It features an XML-based keycode configuration file format, which makes it possible to define the hotkeys to launch any programs you want.

Our explanation
Hotkeys is a small package that enables the functionality of the multimedia keys on most laptops and keyboards, which are otherwise not detected by the distro.

Official website
http://alioth.debian.org/projects/hotkeys/

Related Packages

 * hotkeys
 * hotkeys-debug