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

[Peter Jay Salzman]

Thanks for replying!

On Sat 17 Jul 04, 10:37 AM, 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.

Great guess!  Unfortunately, they were empty.

> > 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!
 
Ack.  I tried:

apt-get install --reinstall xlibs    xlibs-static-pic xbase-clients
                            libx11-6 xlibs-static-dev


to no avail.    There is an X keymap error, but I think it's been like
this for awhile:

   The XKEYBOARD keymap compiler (xkbcomp) reports:
   > Error:            No Symbols named "microsoft" in the include file
   > "pc/us"
   >                   Exiting
   >                   Abandoning symbols file "default"
   Errors from xkbcomp are not fatal to the X server

The keyboard stanza of my XF86Config file is:

   Section "InputDevice"
      Identifier  "Generic Keyboard"
      Driver      "keyboard"
      Option      "CoreKeyboard"
      Option      "XkbRules"   "xfree86"
      Option      "XkbModel"   "pc104"
      Option      "XkbLayout"  "us"
      Option      "XkbVariant" "microsoft"
   EndSection

I don't think this has anything to do with my "e" and "c" keys
disappearing.


Any further ideas?  Anybody?  I'm really really desperate here...

Any other packages you think I should try to reinstall?  I tried
reinstalling all packages listed by "dpkg -S xkb".

Bleah.  This blows.   :(  :(   :(   :(

Pete

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