[vox-tech] Help: my c and e keys don't work anymore.

[Henry House]

På lördag, 17 juli 2004, skrev Peter Jay Salzman:
> My "c" and "e" keys stopped working in xterms on X.   They work just
> fine on the console, so it's not a hw issue.  The only things that
> happened recently:
> 
> 1. My system froze this morning.  Required a reboot and fsck.  No
>    "really bad" error messages were printed, just the usual "zero dtime"
>    stuff.

Here's a shot in the dark: have you checked in /lost+found for important files?
The other day I found that /etc/mgetty had migrated to /lost+found after an
fsck after I wondered why fax reception had stopped working.

> That's about it.  I tried restarting X (I'm ashamed to say I even tried
> rebooting).  X is receiving an event for these keys.  The output of xev
> for "e" is shown below (including the output for "r" to compare it with
> it with a working key):
> 
>    KeyRelease event, serial 25, synthetic NO, window 0xc00001,
>        root 0x58, subw 0xc00002, time 368034, (45,50), root:(49,408),
>        state 0x0, keycode 26 (keysym 0x0, NoSymbol), same_screen YES,
>        XLookupString gives 0 bytes:  ""
> 
>    KeyPress event, serial 25, synthetic NO, window 0xc00001,
>        root 0x58, subw 0xc00002, time 368342, (45,50), root:(49,408),
>        state 0x0, keycode 27 (keysym 0x72, r), same_screen YES,
>        XLookupString gives 1 bytes:  "r"

It looks like your keysyms are bogus. Here is what the the C and E keys yield
on one of my systems (Debian stable i386):

KeyRelease event, serial 22, synthetic NO, window 0x800001,^M
    root 0x2e, subw 0x0, time 3458574946, (128,73), root:(868,101),^M
    state 0x0, keycode 54 (keysym 0x63, c), same_screen YES,^M
    XLookupString gives 1 characters:  "c"^M
^M  
KeyRelease event, serial 22, synthetic NO, window 0x800001,^M
    root 0x2e, subw 0x0, time 3458575046, (128,73), root:(868,101),^M
    state 0x0, keycode 26 (keysym 0x65, e), same_screen YES,^M
    XLookupString gives 1 characters:  "e"^M
^M  

The keysyms and keycodes are defined by an ongodly mess of files in
/usr/lib/X11/xkb. You might try and apt-get install --reinstall to make sure
that you have good and complete copies of all packages files. Beyond that, I'm
not sure what to do. :-( Good luck!

-- 
Henry House
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