Comments on: XKB madness

By: Martijn van de Streek

Martijn van de Streek — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You should talk to mjg59 (on freenode, #ubuntu-laptop); there’s a special startup script which loads key mappings depending on the laptop model.

He might have ideas on how to extend it for keyboards.

By: Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The keycodes shown by xkb are mapped to symbolic names in /etc/X11/xkb/keysyms/xfree86:

= 233;
= 234;

By: Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ouch. No preview button? No description of what sort of markup is acceptable in these comment forms? Here’s what I intended to quote, rewritten in HTML:

= 233;
= 234;

By: Crispin

Crispin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Marius,

Thanks! that is just what I was looking for

By: Erich Schubert

Erich Schubert — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi,
I've been using that for ages - my current setup is to have in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/erich the following:
partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "erich" {
name[Group1]= "Erichs Thinkpad";

key { [ XF86Mail ] };
key { [ XF86Launch1 ] };
key { [ XF86Search ] };
key { [ XF86Launch2 ] };
key { [ XF86Launch3 ] };
// key { [ XF86Stop ] };
key { [ Hyper_L ] };
key { [ XF86Forward ] };
key { [ XF86Back ] };
modifier_map Mod4 { Hyper_L };
};

Note that I use one of the buttons as additional modifier.
The Back and Forward buttons are most useful for switching desktops, I love them. Mail and Search correspond to these icons on the actual buttons, I didn't look for other matches.

The big girpes I have are with upgrades. This is in a separate file, and thus works just fine, but I have also modifications in the "xorg", "xorg.lst" and "xorg.xml" files, so this keyboard layout shows up in the gnome keyboard dialogs.
Unfortunately, whenever I upgrade my Xorg version I have to merge these changes in the configuration files...
And currently, Xkb is somehow broken - on each login I get the message that it doesn't work, but the layout is just fine - and I have absolutely no clue how to fix it...
When I change something with the keyboard settings, the GTK theme reverts to default and then comes back to my setting - looks like a crashing gnome-settings-daemon to me...

By: Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I used to have a custom XKB keymap in a Debian package that used diversions to survive upgrades. It broke after the xkb directory got reoganized, and I couldn’t be bothered to update it. These days I have a shell script with xmodmap commands to remap a couple of keys, and I run it late from gnome-session, after GNOME has had the chance to load its own keymap.