Linux and a USB VEC foot pedal

A new gadget has been showing up: a VEC USB foot pedal used for transcription.

I plug the foot pedal into the USB port and a /dev/usb/hiddev0 device shows up. This is enough to make Transcribe! happy, and you can assign actions to the pedal devices in Transcribe! and go on using it.

In Ubuntu Feisty /dev/usb/hiddev0 won't appear automatically. Luckily, an old style mkdir /dev/usb; mknod /dev/usb/hiddev0 c 180 96 does the job.

What I couldn't do is make the device show up as a joystick, a keyboard or whatever else that could generate usable events. This is strange, because the device seem to identify properly as a HID device.

Dear Lazyweb, how can I get events out of the thing, and then map one pedal to Alt, one to Enter and one to TAB?