Ken Moffat wrote:
On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 05:18:42PM +0100, Alan Lord wrote:
Is this a new keyboard ? How is it connected ? You are saying that nothing shows with 'showkey' and nothing with 'xev' ?
Nope, it isn't a new keyboard. It is quite old, a dell kb. There is no output from that key using showkey.
Did the same hardware work on any identifiable older kernel ?
It certainly used to work on other LFS builds and I don't recall seeing this problem until this build (Kernel is 2.6.16.16).
I'm very interested in this, because I've had a similar problem since the back end of last year, but lacked sufficient time to try to get to the bottom of it. In my case, I use a PS/2 KVM switch to share the screen/mouse/kbd between 4 machines. One of these is a G5 mac, with a usb connection, and there the \ key on a UK pc keyboard doesn't show up (my workaround is to specify a US layout, and try to remember which machine I'm using - my laptop is a mac, so I'm fairly used to US-style layouts). To clarify, the other desktops use a UK layout AND en_GB.UTF-8, and when I first saw this problem I was not using UTF-8.
Interestingly, I have a 4 port KVM which has ps/2 inputs for the keyboard and mouse and uses USB outputs. So the connection to Winblows and LFS is USB...
At first I assumed it was a problem in usb|hid, but playing with all the available zeroed bytes in various kernel keyboard tables produced no results. My guess is that something in the input subsystem is broken (the earliest kernel I tried was 2.6.14), but it obviously doesn't affect many people. Unfortunately, kernels < 2.6.16 are unpleasant on that box (fans on permanently), and kernels < 2.6.15 don't have a working network, so I can't test arbitrary early kernels to see what works, but knowing when it broke might motivate me to take another look.
I have an old partition on that machine which is an early March 2006 LFS based on 2.6.12.5. The same problem exhibits itself there too!
If I can be bothered, I might crawl about under my [very messy] desk and see if it works plugged into the ps/2 port...
There was a similar breakage around 2.6.2, according to google, but that should be ancient history. Ken
Thanks for your interest, let's hope we can find something that fixes it. I was half expecting Alexander would post a simple one liner to my query with the fix; like he usually does... :-)
Al -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
