XFree86 packages mess, Xkb broken, how to clean up
Hi,
Some time ago I did something dreadfully stupid on my Debian - I
upgraded a repository, which was trully not meant for installing on a
normal Debian:
#maemo
deb http://repository.maemo.org/ maemo ossw
deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/ maemo ossw
In case you have been wondering it's a repo with a lot of things to be
run in a sandbox to provide environment and tools for developing apps
for the new Nokia 770 Linux tablet. It is meant to be used inside the
sandbox.
Well, I put this in my desktop's /etc/apt/sources.list and dist-upgraded
(quite a few packages got upgraded) and installed some packages on top
of it. Next, I completely forgot what I have installed. Next, I figured
what I have done, and removed the repo from my sources.list, but as
everything seemed to be working OK, I decided to clean it up some other day.
A month later, after some upgrades of X my xkb stopped working. I
noticed that /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb does not exist, so I made a
symlinked it to /etc/X11/xkb/. Now, to my surprise X would seem to start
OK, but my keyboard did not work properly (I could do Ctrl-Alt-Bksp, or
toggle NumLock, or even switch xkb groups with RWin, but I could not
type any letters or numbers, nor could I do Ctrl-Alt-F1, etc.).
Removing the link made the keyboard work properly, but I was obvoiously
unable to switch keyboard layouts. In this situation XFree86.0.log was
reporting that:
Couldn't load XKB keymap, falling back to pre-XKB keymap
I spent many hours trying to find packages that came from the maemo
repository (is there any proper way to do it? If yes, please tell me),
and downgrading every package I found to the one in Debian unstable
(which is what I run). It did not fix the xkb issue. I diffed my
/etc/X11/xkb/ to one on a working Sid and found no differences.
Now, as
dpkg -S /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb
tells me that the file I was missing belongs to the libx11-6 package,
and when I hit the problem I was running a version of the package that
came from maemo, I am fairly confident that upgrading from that repo is
the reason why xkb stopped working.
I have reinstalled many X-related packages with no success. I would not
mind reinstalling the whole lot and more again, and even losing some
configuration data, as my alternative at the moment seems to be a
from-the-scratch install, and this sounds wrong (although it is so easy,
I would prefer not to do it).
So, all ideas are very welcome.
Regards,
Andro
--
Andrey Andreev
University of Helsinki
Dept. of Computer Science
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