Keyboard configuration

[Tim Niemueller <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi list.

Warning, this is a rant. Last week I got an IBM T41p. So I went and 
installed FC3 on the notebook. Works pretty good so far, but there are 
some things that are really annoying. The worst thing is the keyboard 
configuration. The default configuration works out of the box so don't 
get me wrong, basics are working.

But newer IBM notebooks have two extra keys beside the cursor-up key 
(see http://www.theregister.co.uk/media/1333.jpg). I'm now trying to get 
these keys to work reliably for hours without success...

From xev I know the key scan code, they are 234 (left) and 233 (right). 
nice, so just create an xmodmap file and load it, done... Hah!

I created that very file and mapped left to F19 and right to F20. X now 
reported these settings just fine. So I went on to set Gnome to load 
that file (using gnome session settings). When setting priority to 50 it 
would load but then be overwritten by some other program, as it seems. 
No effect. So I set the priority to 30 and the keys were loaded - after 
an extra delay of about a minute during the loading process when the 
splash was shown... OK, then I would have to do it the xkb way. Hah!

Have you ever looked at those files? I read quiet a bit of documentation 
but it's just weirdo. No way to figure out where to tweak what and how 
much to get it cleanly integrated. And if you even plan to make it 
available from the Gnome config tool (so that this may become a patch to 
let more users benefit) it's even stranger.

I finally found out that the keyboard setting seems to be just for the 
geometry display without deeper sense. The keyboard is set in xorg.conf 
to pc105, period... It has some influence on the symbol tables loaded. 
but I could not get it to load the files I had written. Then I tried it 
to make it an add-on to te german (de) symbol table with a new 
"thinkpadt41p" section. Without success.

If you look deeper into this gkb still uses xmodmap, while on startup 
you are notified that your .xmodmap file will be ignored. How does that 
fit!?

Is there somebody out there with deeper knowledge willing to help to get 
these simple to keys integrated. I think they would be just fine for 
switching to the left/right desktop...

Thanks,

	Tim

--
    Tim Niemueller <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>      www.niemueller.de
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 Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)