Video and Keymap Quirks

[Hans de Goede]

Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-07-10 at 13:31 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:

>> I've been working on this, but currently I'm stuck on getting my intermediate 
>> solution for the generation of XKeysyms for these keys integrated into the 
>> xkeyboard-config package. I say intermediate, because in the long run X should 
>> switch from the kbd driver to the evdev driver, changing the way keyysyms get 
>> generated significantly.
> 
> Sure, that will be done before F8.
> 

Will it, is evdev scheduled for F-8, this the first time I've heard this. Also 
evdev upstream has told me that evdev currently cannot handle chinese/japanese 
input, so I think a switch atm is very unlikely.

>> I'm hoping that if others vote for the inclusion of this patch too, it will 
>> help getting it integrated. Ofcourse its possible to disagree with this patch 
>> too, in that case an alternative solution proposal would be very welcome. I've 
>> spare time to work on this, but first I need to know where / how to spend my time.
> 
> Sure, I think we have to work together - the laptop key to switch
> bluetooth off is pretty orthogonal (although related) to mapping one
> keyboard layout to another. For the likes of desktops, we can't do dmi
> matching for the keylayout as this would break when we unplugged and
> replaced the keboard with a different model :-)
> 
> How does your solution work with the new world of evdev and acpi input
> drivers?
> 

I'm mainly focusing on normal (ps2/usb keyboards) with extra keys for 
multimedia and internet stuff. My solution currently assumes that:
1) The kernel generates the correct keycodes for these keys (which is
   true for all usb keyboards and most ps/2 keyboards)
   For the few exceptional ps/2 non laptop keyboards manual setkeycodes calls
   will be necessary, but that will be the case no matter what so for now I'm
   ignoring this.
2) That F-8 will keep using the kbd driver for Xorg, if F-8 will change to
   evdev, then my plan needs to be reworked.

With this assumptions and the focus of internet / multimedia keys, my simple 
and short plan is to:
1) Add Linux virtual ps/2 keyboard fake scancode -> keysym translation to the
    (default) "Generic 104 keys" and "Generic 105 keys (international)" keyboard
    models. This is what the patch in bug 245576 does.
2) Start patching applications (starting with metacity) to have default
    keybindings to these keysyms for relevant actions. Currently atleast for
    metacity the default keybindings for multia media actions are empty.

Notice that 2) is something which will also be necessary once switched to 
evdev, so the only work which will be thrown away because of me choosing in 
intermediate solution (in order to have something working for F-8) is the 
(already written) xkb patch

Regards,

Hans