Broken keyboard layout after lenny/squeeze upgrade.

[Chris Jones <cjns1989@gmail.com>]

Over the weekend, I upgraded a sacrificial copy of my current 'lenny'
to 'squeeze' and ran into a rather odd keyboard issue:

Specifically, the Down and PgDown keys were no longer working.

I ran xev and saw that they were respectively mapped to Super_R and
Compose although I don't remember the upgrade procedure prompting me at
any point to specify anything relative to keyboard configuration.

Google search popped up a couple of threads where other users had run
into similar problems, indicating that the culprit might be something
called 'evdev' and that the following command might fix the issue:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
$ setxkbmap -rules evdev
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Another poster recommended building an xorg.conf file that would cause
the X server to revert to the old 'non-evdev' behavior:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (X Window System server configuration file)

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option              "DontZap"                   "off"
    Option              "AutoAddDevices"            "False"
    Option              "AllowEmptyInput"           "False"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier          "Generic Keyboard"
    Driver              "kbd"
    Option              "XkbRules"    "xorg"
    Option              "XkbModel"    "pc104"
    Option              "XkbLayout"   "us"
EndSection
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Indeed, both workarounds appear to fix the problem for now, but all the
same, they have left me a little frustrated.

Could someone knowledgeable comment on this and explain what's going on?

Thanks,

CJ