XFree86 and Xkb

Forum: X and Fluxbox
Topic: XFree86 and Xkb
started by: Whitesparrow

Posted by Whitesparrow on Aug. 11 2007,20:14

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