I decided I wanted to enable the zoom key on my "Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000" under Linux. Ideally, this would be used for scrolling up and down a page instead of triggering Compiz's zoom feature.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the kernel fix is triaged on ubuntu's bugtracker. This of course meant re­com­pil­ing the kernel manually (or semi-manually since Ubuntu makes this task relatively easy). You'll notice, if you care to check, that there is a patch in the bugtracker to remap the zoom and spellcheck keys to something that xev (and therefore X11) can read.

If you don't know how to recompile your kernel, this fix probably isn't for you. However, …continue.