Re: Knoppix 6.4.4 and the X11 Compose Key
Hello Paul,
On Wed, Mar 09, 2011 at 08:39:51PM +0000, Paul Bryan Roberts wrote:
> I am using the EN MAXI edition of Knoppix 6.4.4 installed to USB.
>
> I have tried configuring the Menu key as the X11Compose key with:
>
> XKBOPTIONS="terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,grp:alt_caps_toggle,shift:breaks_caps,compose:menu"
>
> in the file /etc/default/keyboard. The first three special key
> definitions all appear to work. I get a dead-key effect when I
> press the Menu key but not the composed characters I was hoping for.
This may be related to the fact that Knoppix version 6.4.4 (and 6.5) use
the very newest xorg server 1.9.4. Some things related to keyboard
configuration may have changed here, but I'm not able to tell which ones
yet. :-/
> If have tried the equivalent configuration of KDE through the System
> Settings app with a similar lack of success.
>
> I have used the Menu key as a compose key under both Lenny and
> Squeeze and so was surprised it does not work under Knoppix 6 as
> well.
Caution: The "menu" key may be a hotkey for the window manager, and
therefore may not do what you expect. You may have to disable the menu
key shortcut in the window managers configuration first, prior to using
it for compositing, OR change its keysym.
> I know Debian uses UTF-8 locales by default but the support for this
> under Knoppix 6 is very limited.
> Out of curiosity I did try booting
> with lang=fi-utf-8 and, sure enough, the compose key worked (but
> with some interesting Finnish results). However, I am under the
> impression that UTF-8 isn't essential for the compose key
> functionality.
Using isolatin1 for german (and some other languages) with a 8bit
1-byte-per-character translation instead of utf-8 is just a personal
preference for me in Knoppix, since it has worked well for many years
before. I don't think it's related to compose.
> I did ask on the knoppix.net forum but even utu was unable to help.
>
> Wondering if this might be a long standing undocumented feature of
> Knoppix, I boot up Knoppix 5.3.3, edited xorg.conf to define the
> compose key and restarted X11using ctrl-alt-backspace and the
> compose key worked as expected.
>
> This suggests Knoppix 6 is not behaving as it should. If this is
> the case, is there a (non-Finnish) workaround ?
Unfortunately, I don't know. :-(
You could try to change the locale setting to something with .UTF-8
in /etc/init.d/knoppix-autotonfig (the long case "$LANGUAGE" in ... statement).
Regards
-Klaus
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