Help with configuring my keyboard.

Felix Karpfen felixk at webone.com.au
Thu Mar 21 09:33:32 EST 2002


Nemo - earth native wrote:
> 
> Both my kb at home and work are non-MS 104keys keyboards... (probably
> the same brand/model actually, I aint sure ;)
> 
> ...The left windowskey is a modifier. (Meta_L according to xev)
> ...The right windowskey is not (MultiKey)
> 
> I don't know is this is how it was intended or not, or is a result of
> not being a "Microsoft brand" 104kb ...but it certainly gave me no end
> of grief while tryign to get my wmanager setup ideally... 

Firstly, I would like to thank all who were good enough to reply and
share their experience of keyboard configurations.

Secondly, I have to report that, in the interval, I tried to get a bit
more info myself.  The results explained some of my observations but
were not encouraging.

Apparently, KDE 2 - which I use - has a bug that results in the entries
in my XF86Config file from not being read when KDE loads (something to
do with incorrectly configured soft links)..  That explains my
observation relating to the discrepancy between the supposed XF86Config
values and my actual values.

It looks as though my gamble to use a 105keys International keyboard was
more or less correct (I have feeble aspirations to type in German and
French).  However, that does not do the whole job.  I also need to set
(in KDE) my primary keyboard layout to "US English w/ deadkeys".

When I do that I get:

        keycode         name            function

        37           Left Control       Control_L
        64           Left Alt           Alt_L
       115           Left Window        Super_L
       113           Right Alt          Mode Switch
       116           Right Window       Multi_key
       117           Right (Win)Start   Start key

And, of course, the "deadkeys" setting has other consequences that are a
real pain.  The point of the original article that started me down this
track was to reconfigure some of the unused keys so that the "deadkeys"
setting would not need to be used.  The routine suggested in the article
will not work with a KDE window manager until the bug gets fixed.

But, apart from the deadkey problems, I am still in the dark about what
the differently-configured keys are supposed to achieve.  From tests on
my (experimental) setup, the Start key and the Multi_key appear to do
nothing observable and the Mode Switch implements the "compose" routines
(my documentation says that the Multi_key is supposed to do that).  And
I can find no reference whatever to Super_L.

So, confusion continues to rain.

Felix Karpfen
-- 
Felix Karpfen
felixk at webone.com.au
Public Key 72FDF9DF (DH/DSA)





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