[ltp] XKB driver experiments - G41

[Matt Graham]

On Friday 17 June 2005 09:57, after a long battle with technology, Peter 
B. West wrote:
> I have ventured into the wilds of XKB once again, and have come out
> badly mauled, same as the last time.

Yeah.  XKB is a PITA IME.

> On a "default" keyboard setup, Shift-ScrLk actually reports a NumLk
> event through xev, and enables the embedded numeric keypad, but seems
> to put it into navigation mode.

xmodmap -e 'keycode 77 = Num_Lock' makes it work properly, without doing 
anything with xkb.  Yeah, it's hackish, but sometimes a workaround's as 
good as a fix.

> so I had hopes of mapping PgUp to Page_Up, PgDn to Page_Down, and the
> previous-page and next-page internet keys to Prior and Next
> respectively, which seems neat and tidy to me.  However, i was unable
> to achieve this.  I think the X server insists on being helpful here
> and changing my Page_Up/Page_Down back to Prior/Next, which, if true,
> is extremely unhelpful.

PgUp is supposed to map to keysym Prior AFAICT.  If you map the extra 
keys to Prior, and PgUp to Page_Up, I think things won't work quite the 
way you'd expect in some applications.

> I had hopes of setting the files up to retain the flexibility of
> layouts, variants and options that is available (albeit
> near-impossible to trace) in the standard files.  That hope was soon
> dashed. The files are available at
> http://www.users.tpg.com.au/pbwest/thinkpad.tgz

I don't know how often other users need to use the insane flexibility of 
layouts that's theoretically available, though.  I personally just need 
the keysyms in iso8859-1, so setting LANG to "en_US" before X starts 
and doing "xmodmap -e 'keycode 109 = Multi_key' " makes all that 
possible.  Oh well, I hope someone finds your work useful....

-- 
   We're standing there pounding a dead parrot on the counter, and the
   management response is to frantically swap in new counters to see if
   that fixes the problem.           --Peter Gutmann, ASR 6/18/1998
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see