Re: Please test Macintosh keyboards with xkb-data 0.8-12exp1
On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 03:50:37PM +0200, Michael Schmitz wrote:
> [... most interesting discussion of xkb workings snipped ...]
> > In unstable, there are 2 models: macintosh and macintosh_old.
> > The latter is for older kernels, and should probably be renamed into
> > macintosh_adb for clarity reasons.
>
> Please pick another name - macintosh_old is strictly for ADB Macs that use
> a very old kernel (or a compatibility feature) to send keycodes in the ADB
> mapping. The very same ADB Macs now use PC style keycode mapping; that's a
> kernel side issue only! macintosh_old is clearly more appropriate than
> macintosh_adb. If you want to make this any clearer, use a name like
> macintosh_oldkernel or some abbreviation of this.
I do not understand why macintosh_adb is wrong, but hey, I know nothing
about Macs, so I will put what you folks are telling me; let's keep
macintosh_old.
> Both the kernel version and the potential compatibility mapping can easily
> be detected at run time - check for presence of the file
>
> /proc/sys/dev/mac_hid/keyboard_sends_linux_keycodes
>
> If this contains 0, ADB keycodes are used. If the file is not present or
> 1, Linux keycodes (unless the kernel version is fairly ancient: 2.4.26
> already had the keyboard_sends_linux_keycodes hack. 2.4.18 might not)
>
> To complete your data collection: on my german ADB ISO keyboard, <> and ^
> are swapped unless macintosh_old2 is used, just as Helge reported. That's
> the adb devices: [2]: 2 c4 [3]: 3 1 [7]: 7 1f case as posted before.
Ok, we are pretty close to a solution. If I understand what has been
said in this thread, with a recent kernal, all Mac keyboards should have
a unique model name in xkb-data. Auto-detection does not always work,
this is why an alternative model is needed to swap two keys. Hopefully
kernel will be updated and auto-detection will work better in the
future, so people may have to switch from this alternative model to
the standard model.
Now there is one question left: what is the standard model?
In the terminoology of xkb-data 0.8-12exp1, is this macintosh_old2
or macintosh? I would say the former, since these are the same keycodes
as with PC keyboards, but I would be glad if someone could confirm.
Oh, one more question: what is a good name for the alternative model?
What about macintosh_swap?
Thanks.
Denis
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