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Dieter@be

Forum Fellow

From: Belgium

Registered: 2006-11-05

Posts: 2,001

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Macbook pro keymap trouble

Hi, I've been messing with this for a while but I can't get it right

as you know, macbook pro's (and macbooks, macs,..) have their own, special keyboard layout.  I want to map the special keys to become more normal (eg right apple key or the key next to it) should become alt-gr, so that i can type | or # by using alt-gr and the appropriate number key, that i can have home and end keys by combining apples "Fn" key with left or right arrow keys, and so on.  And since I'm Belgian, I'ld prefer azerty over querty (on normal computers i use the be-latin1 keymap)

I would like to have this working in both console mode as in Xorg, so instead of twiddling to much with the XkbLayout settings which only gives results in Xorg, I'm guessing I should rather get a good keymap instead, so I can enjoy that in both worlds?

Arch includes some mac keymaps in /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/mac but when I tried loadkeys mac-be it worked pretty well (I think, I don't want to try it again, read on) but outside Xorg it was a total mess: every key seemed to be mapped to something else, even keys like backspace or enter were mapped to characters like "e" etc, so I couldnt even load another keymap or shutdown the computer, I had to force shutdown (probably corrupting my filesystem).

On the this page I found another supposedley good working map (this one) but again, outside of X I got different behavior, I couldnt type characters like | or # anymore, the alt-gr key seemed to have become an enter-key, it was querty instead of azerty, ...

It would be great if anyone could help me with this

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< Daenyth> and he works prolifically
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ndrummond

Member

Registered: 2007-04-10

Posts: 4

Re: Macbook pro keymap trouble

I am using a german qwertz macbook pro core duo .. keyboard map is http://cyanescent.co.uk/mac-de.txt

the best way to go is to load a similar keymap at boot, then on the console run "dumpkeys > myfile.map" and spend a while customizing the output. use "loadkeys myfile.map" to hoover your file up again. To get the AltGr keys working you need append its keycode to the third column of the base key (so in my map, AltGr 5 maps to 'bracketleft', which can be found on keycode 6); the fourth token maps to the left Apple key. I didn't manage to find maps for shift + AltGr, or Alt though...