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Articles tagged with gentoo may not totally apply to your preferred flavor of Linux.

If you are using Microsoft’s excellent Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000—at least one product that Microsoft got right—under Linux, chances are that the zoom slider in the middle of the keyboard does not work out of the box. The problem is that the zoom slider uses keycodes greater than 255, which the evdev driver cannot handle.

Fortunately, you can use udev to remap the keys. The default keyboard mappings are contained in /lib/udev/hwdb.d/60-keyboard.hwdb, where you will also find detailed documentation comments on the file format in the header, including:

# To update this file, create a new file
#   /etc/udev/hwdb.d/70-keyboard.hwdb
# and add your rules there. To load the new rules execute (as root):
#   udevadm hwdb --update
#   udevadm trigger /dev/input/eventXX
# where /dev/input/eventXX is the keyboard in question. If in
# doubt, simply use /dev/input/event* to reload all input rules.

You might even already find a section for the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 in this file. If that is the case, copy its definition and use it as a starting point for the new /etc/udev/hwdb.d/70-keyboard.hwdb. If you want the zoom slider keys to be mapped as “Page Up” and “Page Down” keys, use the following:

keyboard:usb:v045Ep00DB*
 KEYBOARD_KEY_c022d=pageup
 KEYBOARD_KEY_c022e=pagedown

Of course, you can map it to anything you like. For example, to emulate a mouse wheel scroll, you could define your custom mapping as:

keyboard:usb:v045Ep00DB*
 KEYBOARD_KEY_c022d=scrollup
 KEYBOARD_KEY_c022e=scrolldown

This should result in Xorg receiving the zoom slider keys as XF86ScrollUp and XF86ScrollDown. Finally, make things work with xdotool¹ by binding those keys within your window manager to run xdotool click 4 (scroll up) and xdotool click 5 (scroll down).