Whitesparrow
  
 
 
  
 
 
Group: Members 
Posts: 6 
Joined: Mar. 2006 | 
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Posted: Aug. 11 2007,20:14 | 
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I was doing a small project with dsl during my summer holydays. I had to build an X-terminal-solution that works with a lot of different keyboard and screen resolutions.
  Because I had no diskspace to waste I decide to use a standart dsl and the Xfree86.dsl. I did a HD-install and unpackt the XFree86.dsl in the /-directory.
  Everthing was working fine, just like i expected dsl to do. But when I tried a non-us keyboard the first, i noticed that the Alt-gr-key wasn't working.  
  I found a working solution in this thread : Look here
  Now the german keyboard worked fine, but i needed some other keyboard working too. And after a lot reading and testing I found out the xmodmap dosen't really solve the problem.  It's more a kind of workaround.  It only 'remaps' the keys after starting the Xserver. 
  There is still that error message when starting Xfree : XKB: ... fallling back to default keymap.
  So I found out that the Xfree86.dsl dosen't include /etc/xkb and the binary /etc/xkb/xkbcomp. This means you can declare any layout you wish in your XFree86config, whitout the keymaps and xkbcomp you'll always get the us layout.  
  After searching this board I found  a post (somewehre don't remember now) where someone suggest adding the /etc/X11/xkb from a Knoppix live cd.
  And this is what I finally did : I copied the xkb-dir from an old Knoppix 3.2 with cp -rL to my harddrive installation.   ( L becasue I needed the data not the symlinks)  /edit : I've just noticed that you'll also need to create the directory /var/tmp/ because XKB started complaining that he can't write this dir after working fine serveral times.  I started Xfree and there was no more error about XKB and my german keyboard worked as expected with all the Umlaute(äöü) and all the Alt-Gr key.
  I don't know wheter someone has mentioned this solution or the reason for this error message before ( I searched the board, but i din't find anything ), so decided to post it here.
  I'm also wondering wether the author of that extension hasn't already solved this problem. I'll try to pack a XFree.dsl with xkb if I have the time to next week
  I hope that I was right and no one posted this hint before and that this might help to make dsl more usefull for some people with non-us keyboard out there.
 
  Whitesparrow 
  -------------- Expert in XFree86,PXE-boot and other illnesses.
  ~DSL-realted Projects~ +Showcase (info terminals more :http://www.sebastians-site.de/index.php=showcase) +VM ware XT (an X-terminal running in VM Ware, supporting many keyboard layouts)
  Microsoft Windows (TM) may cause crashes or bluescreens.
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