Bug#605621: keyboard no longer working in X
Package: upgrade-reports
Severity: normal
After upgrading from lenny to squeeze my keyboard stopped working in X (but
worked with the console). It turned out that my /etc/X11/xorg.conf contained
an invalid keyboard variant ("nodeadkeys" from a "de" keyboard I had a few
years ago). X in lenny simply ignored the invalid variant (I guess, or was
us/nodeadkeys valid in lenny?).
This setting was put into /etc/default/keyboard during the upgrade, but
X in squeeze silently fails with a wrong keyboard variant. See also bug
571636 for a similar problem.
The real problem IMHO is that X silently fails for invalid keyboard
layouts or variants (invalid in the sense that there is no keymap for that
layout/variant, not that it does not match the real layout). Why can't X
print an error message to the log file, and fall back to some default?
Even if some keys result in different characters a wrong layout/variant
is much better that a completely dead keyboard.
Ironically, the "nodeadkeys" variant had exactly the opposite effect, it
rendered *all* keys dead ;-)
Joachim
-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (950, 'testing'), (800, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
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