On May 17, 2012, at 3:50 PM, Ken Moffat wrote:

> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 03:38:00PM -0700, Qrux wrote:
>> 
>> Is the rationale for kbd inclusion in LFS (as opposed to BLFS) the fact that 
>> there are international users who don't have US keyboards?
> 
> Even for insular Americans, it lets you setfont, so you can use a
> style and size of console font which matches your preferences (as
> distinct from using whatever your BIOS, or the kernel (for
> framebuffers - but everyone loves penguins, don't they ?) offers.

I'm trying to get at why it's necessary--by asking for rationale for inclusion. 
 It was not an effort to figure out which (mostly unused/useless) features it 
provides.

Console fonts (and asking people to build FB support in kernels) seem like a 
waste of effort when most people probably spend 99% of their time SSH'ed in to 
their LFS box or running X (both BLFS considerations).

> But yes, I suggest that most people here don't have US keyboards.
> If we were all American, we'd probably still use ASCII.

What non-pedantic distinction are you making?  There is no such thing as an 
ASCII keyboard, since ASCII is an encoding.  Are you making the point that the 
default kernel keyboard drivers converts keypresses into the ASCII-encoding for 
the character printed on the keys of a generic 101-key QWERTY keyboard?  What 
question does that answer?

Does the vanilla kernel & userland require kbd to exist in order to use the 
console?  If not, why does it exist as a part of LFS?  Are there people with 
keyboards such that the default kernel driver (i.e., without kdb) cannot 
interpret certain keypresses?

Even if so...Why does that even matter?  Login as root, and pick passwords 
based on some intersection between your keyboard and the default set of 
recognized (ASCII) keycodes.  You only need enough functionality at the console 
to get userland network connectivity or X.

Is kbd necessary even to drive a standard QWERTY keyboard with a vanilla 
kernel/userland?

        Q

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