Fedora 8 internet keys support detailed plan + patches

[Florian Festi]

Relax everyone!

This topic is too complicated that any of us has a chance of knowing all 
problems yet.

All efforts that make sure that hardware key presses are mapped to the right 
kernel keycodes are highly appreciated (laptops, PS/2 keyboards, USB 
keyboards). Btw I have written some scripts to convert keyboard setting from 
various sources into setkeycodes scripts (or anything else) including 
hotkey-setup, lineak, keytouch. They are currently checked into the 
hotkey-setup repository: https://developer.berlios.de/projects/hotkey-setup/
http://svn.berlios.de/wsvn/hotkey-setup/trunk/tools/?rev=0&sc=0

If this works the linux kernel will only show one kind of keyboard to both 
console and X11. And it doesn't matter much if this is called the linux or 
the Microsoft keyboard.

As Nicolas already stated the AT keyboard emulation as used by the X11 kbd 
driver (setting the console to raw mode) has a limitation to 240 keys.

Problem here is that the linux kernel has a lot of key codes that are out of 
range (see linux/input.h 0x160 up). These cannot mapped consistently into 
the 240 key range of the emulation. Because of this X11 has to switch to the 
evdev driver in the long run. Any work in this direction is appreciated. 
Nevertheless this might not be the right step for F8 as evdev wasn't in good 
shape when I looked at it 7 months ago.

Things are even worse as on the X11 side there are no Xkeysyms to map lots 
of the kernel keysyms to. I put together a list half a year ago. They can be 
found at the bottom of http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Laptop/HotKeys.
Don't give too much an the other text on the page.

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Right now the old way of sending X-keysyms is so full of quirks and
> warts  I really don't hink minimal effort would be to try to fix it.
Patching the xkbd map shouldn't be too much effort for the time until we 
switched really everything to the evdev driver.

 > Note: Stanislav Brabec who created /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/inet is
 > currently working on an xkb patch which will create a virtual linux
 > keyboard model.

Have you any pointers? I have the model already finished (mostly)...

Florian Festi