Before I speculate on more details about this problem, let me add that pdecat's persistent fix works fine but requires an additional `update- initramfs -u -k all` for the option to be set correctly.
I own two Apple aluminium keyboards of different generations (German layout) , one MacBook Air and one old Early-2008 white MacBook. While the laptops seem to work fine for quite some time now, both alu keyboards experienced this issue in different Ubuntu releases; at least one of them always suffers from it up until today. (Count this as confirmed for Quantal.) In the past, I used the xmodmap fix from above, but that didn't work out now because of Bug #1016996. Since I didn't know about pdecat's fix at first, I dived a bit into the shady areas of XKB configuration and found out that XKB offers options called "apple:badmap" and 'apple:goodmap' targeting the exact same problem. Those are listed in "/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base" and `[…]/evdev`, but not in the respective `.lst` and `.xml` files and therefore don't show up in the GNOME keyboard options dialog. When it comes to persisent configuration, I didn't succeed in settings the options via `xorg.conf` as described by [1] and [2]. Running `setxkbmap […]` at session start through `gnome-session-properties` works in principal, but seems to conflict with settings from the GNOME keyboard options. (Only one of them will be set due to what seems to be some kind of race-condition.) What worked for me was running the command via `.profile`, but just then I came across pdecat's much simpler and system-wide approach :-). As there seem to be different generations of Apple keyboards with different behaviours out there, I believe that there won't be a general fix for this problem. What should however be done in my opinion, is offering a simple way to get the right configuration. I think the GNOME keyboard options are the right place to do that, and therefore the "apple:badmap" option should be added to the `.lst` and `.xml` files like described above. That's why I'm adding xkeyboard-config to the affected packages. [1] http://wiki.debian.org/MacBook#X11_.28X_Window.29 [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Apple_Keyboard#.3C_and_.3E_have_changed_place_with_.C2.A7_and_.C2.BD ** Also affects: xkeyboard-config (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to xkeyboard-config in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/214786 Title: Apple USB ISO keyboard has incorrectly swapped keys Status in Mactel Support: Confirmed Status in “linux” package in Ubuntu: Fix Released Status in “xkeyboard-config” package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: Since upgrading kernel to version 2.6.24-12.22 two keys are now swapped on my Apple USB aluminium keyboard with danish layout. Now the keys "<" and "½" are swapped and no longer matches the actual print on the keycaps. The error is isolated to the following commit: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu- hardy.git;a=commitdiff;h=efb3031b446d441dca5b10619503ac0bba7f9748 This commit introduced a key swapping for all "ISO" type Apple keyboards. In my case this swapping is incorrect, and generally it seems like a very bad idea to perform hard coded locale specific key mapping in kernel space as this is also done several places in user space. The included patch reverts the behavior to the default that matches the keycap printing. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mactel-support/+bug/214786/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
