Bug#505033: x11-xkb-utils: (EE) XKB: Couldn't compile keymap

[Francesco Poli <frx@firenze.linux.it>]

Package: x11-xkb-utils
Version: 7.4+1
Severity: important

Hi,
I've recently found out that my Italian keyboard layout is no longer
working properly on my laptop.
ASCII characters may still be typed with the keys that show them
on the Italian keyboard (e.g.: the " character may be obtained
with Shift+2), but nothing is typed when I press keys that should
produce non-ASCII characters (e.g.: accented vowel keys produce
nothing, but their keypress event is detected by xev, hence the
key *is* working).
Moreover, the Ctrl+Alt+F1 combo no longer works (I cannot switch
to the console).  Another thing that now fails is my set of
keyboard shortcuts, which are configured through Fluxbox and based
on the LeftWin key...

My laptop is an old Acer Aspire 1302 XV.

The relevant part of /etc/X11/xorg.conf is:

  Section "InputDevice"
          Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
          Driver          "kbd"
          Option          "CoreKeyboard"
          Option          "XkbRules"      "xorg"
          Option          "XkbModel"      "pc105"
          Option          "XkbLayout"     "it"
  EndSection

and it hasn't changed recently.

I found the following error in /var/log/Xorg.0.log :

  (EE) Error compiling keymap (server-0)
  (EE) XKB: Couldn't compile keymap

One or two weeks ago there was no problem with the Italian
keyboard.
I tried to manually set the keyboard layout:

  $ setxkbmap it
  Error loading new keyboard description
  $ setxkbmap us
  Error loading new keyboard description

and so forth (whatever arguments I pass to setxkbmap).
These tests also produce more of the above mentioned errors
in /var/log/Xorg.0.log ...

On the other hand, other Debian testing (desktop) boxes I use
work properly and have no such issues.  Those other boxes have
U.S. keyboards, but I also tried to run "setxkbmap it"
on them and obtained an Italian mapping with no problem
whatsoever (accented vowels work, even though they are
of course not visible on the U.S. keyboard...).

I cannot understand what change on my laptop produced
the problem: apart from updating packages from testing
repositories, I recently installed im-switch (but I haven't yet
configured anything for regular users).  The desktop boxes
(that work properly) already have im-switch installed
(and get regular testing updates from the repositories).

I searched the web and the Debian BTS about the above
mentioned errors and I found a number of bug reports
regarding similar (but not identical, since many of them
dealt with more customized configurations) issues.
However, most such bug reports are old and long closed.

I am not sure this bug report really belongs to
package x11-xkb-utils: please reassign to the appropriate one,
if it belongs elsewhere.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages x11-xkb-utils depends on:
ii  cpp                           4:4.3.2-2  The GNU C preprocessor (cpp)
ii  libc6                         2.7-15     GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libice6                       2:1.0.4-1  X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libsm6                        2:1.0.3-2  X11 Session Management library
ii  libx11-6                      2:1.1.5-2  X11 client-side library
ii  libxaw7                       2:1.0.4-2  X11 Athena Widget library
ii  libxkbfile1                   1:1.0.5-1  X11 keyboard file manipulation lib
ii  libxmu6                       2:1.0.4-1  X11 miscellaneous utility library
ii  libxt6                        1:1.0.5-3  X11 toolkit intrinsics library
ii  x11-common                    1:7.3+18   X Window System (X.Org) infrastruc

x11-xkb-utils recommends no packages.

x11-xkb-utils suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information