Robert - thanks for the advice. I posted through nabble.com and it looks like it stripped out the code as it was in a <raw> tag.
I don't fully understand how pygame works and I hoped that by setting os.environ["SDL_VIDEODRIVER"] = "dummy" I could capture key presses. Is this the case or is a real display necessary before pygame can capture key presses. Code below. # Import a library of functions called 'pygame' import os import sys import pygame import time os.environ["SDL_VIDEODRIVER"] = "dummy" # No Display pygame.init() done = False while done == False: print "..." for event in pygame.event.get(): print "There was a pygame event" if event.type == pygame.QUIT: done=True print "I pressed the QUIT KEY" time.sleep(2) if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN: print "a key has been pressed KEYKEYKEYKEY" keypressed = pygame.key.name(event.key) print (keypressed) time.sleep(2)