So the item you linked to is made by PI Engineering. If you peruse their website you will find that they sell both USB and PS/2 versions of the boards that live inside their gizmos. But since you sound a bit concerned about price, you probably won't like the fact that they sell them for $60 on their webstore.
I actually have a (USB) version of the X-Keys editor, and it has one particularly nice feature which supposedly all of their models support. Instead of acting just like a keyboard, it sends the data to the USB consumer page (or something like that), which allows you to have a dedicated application that polls the status of the various buttons and jog/shuttle, rather than having them just sent to the current application. This gives you boolean status on all keys. (They provide source and DLL's for windows to do this. I don't believe there's any howto for linux yet.)
I will also say that their gizmos are solidly built and have good tactile feedback. That's very important. Sadly, the USB cord attached to mine was a little on the short side (3 feet?), so I had to get an extender for my setup.
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So the item you linked to is made by PI Engineering. If you peruse their website you will find that they sell both USB and PS/2 versions of the boards that live inside their gizmos. But since you sound a bit concerned about price, you probably won't like the fact that they sell them for $60 on their webstore.
I actually have a (USB) version of the X-Keys editor, and it has one particularly nice feature which supposedly all of their models support. Instead of acting just like a keyboard, it sends the data to the USB consumer page (or something like that), which allows you to have a dedicated application that polls the status of the various buttons and jog/shuttle, rather than having them just sent to the current application. This gives you boolean status on all keys. (They provide source and DLL's for windows to do this. I don't believe there's any howto for linux yet.)
I will also say that their gizmos are solidly built and have good tactile feedback. That's very important. Sadly, the USB cord attached to mine was a little on the short side (3 feet?), so I had to get an extender for my setup.