Subject: 2.2.18: a total loss (at least for me); keyboard doesn't work anymore.
From: Riccardo Gusso (rick@leonardo.math.unipd.it)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2000 - 09:15:34 MST
intentionally use this provocative subject to attract attention on this, in
my opinion, fundamental topic: the correct working of keyboard.
I have an iMac rev.B with Italian usb qzerty keyboard. Before I was using
kernel ben_2.2.17pre20, and I modified the keyboard maps (both for the
console and for X; the ones you can find in /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/mac/ and
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/macintosh/) to respect my keyboard layout.
Now I got and compiled 2.2.18 and I am lost: the first time I booted it I
found I had completely lost the correspondence between buttons and outputs;
using 'showkey' and 'xev' I noticed that the keycodes were completely
different from the previous ones. Following a suggestions given to me in
comp.os.linux.powerpc newsgroup I went to
http://home.munich.netsurf.de/Franz.Sirl/inputppc.html and saw that now (at
least for the console) you don't need anymore mac-* maps, but you have to
use standard linux keymaps. So I did, and for the console things went
better, apart from the modifications I have to do to adapt these maps to
Italian layout. But the big problem is with X: I'm using Xpmac (I tried to
start XFree 4.0 I compiled with previous kernel, but didn't succeeded in it)
and, after a lot of tries to understand how it loads the keycodes file (in
my situation it is /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/keycodes/macintosh) to change it
with another one (but which?) I write down all the keycodes of my keyboard I
got with 'xev' to manually modify this file. With my big surprise I have
found that different buttons on my keyboard give the same keycode (for
example 8, 2, 4, 6, on the keypad and the up, down, left, right arrows) and
so I don't really know how to do. Besides this, if I press the space bar the
cursor starts a run on the shell and I have to press another button to stop
it. So I have come back to previous kernel and I'm waiting for better days.
Just a consideration: in my opinion (and not only: I report some
observations made by Italian wanting-to-use-linux-on-mac people) one of the
fundamental thing to increase the number of linux users and not to restrict
its use to an elite is to have a simple way to obtain one's own keyboard
working.
Bye.
Rick
--
"Like a bird on the wire
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I tried in my way to be free."
L. Cohen, "Bird on the wire"
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