Arch Linux

onearm

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From: Anywhere but here

Registered: 2006-07-06

Posts: 359

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[somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

Hello again and sorry for asking for help yet again

I'm experiencing a problem with AltGr and thus with producing accented letters, the euro sign, the at and the comment signs and, last but not least, the grave accent. I'm using an italian keyboard which works fine under arch32 but, with the same settings, same programs and same versions, doesn't under arch64

The relevant xorg.conf part:

    Identifier  "Keyboard1"
    Driver      "kbd"
    Option      "XkbRules" "xorg"
    Option    "XkbModel"    "pc105"
    Option      "XkbLayout" "it"

The rc.conf part:

LOCALE="it_IT.utf8"
HARDWARECLOCK="localtime"
USEDIRECTISA="no"
TIMEZONE="Europe/Rome"
KEYMAP="it"
CONSOLEFONT="lat9w-16"
CONSOLEMAP="8859-15_to_uni"
USECOLOR="yes"

which tells that I'm trying to use of an utf8 locale
The locale output:

LANG=it_IT.utf8
LC_CTYPE="it_IT.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="it_IT.utf8"
LC_TIME="it_IT.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="it_IT.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="it_IT.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="it_IT.utf8"
LC_PAPER="it_IT.utf8"
LC_NAME="it_IT.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="it_IT.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="it_IT.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="it_IT.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="it_IT.utf8"
LC_ALL="it_IT.utf8"

Xev sees the AltGr as:

KeyPress event, serial 32, synthetic NO, window 0x2200001,
    root 0x13b, subw 0x0, time 888688, (-951,614), root:(244,770),
    state 0x0, keycode 113 (keysym 0xfe03, ISO_Level3_Shift), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes: 
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes: 
    XFilterEvent returns: False

which is completely ok because it's the same I see under arch32, and when pressing the aforementioned combinations (eurosign, grave accent, numbersign, at, brackets) it correctly identifies them; problem is, under urxvt, vim, firefox and openoffice (tried briefly also with xterm with the sole difference that the eurosign shows fine) I can't see any of these signs. With urxvt is the most strange situation because pressing the comment (numbersign) symbol it appears correctly but prints a return too, clearing the line.
If it's any help I could post the vimrc and .Xdefaults but they are identical to the ones I'm using flawlessly under arch32, as are the previous configuration files and the xev output for all the keyboard buttons. I'm using openbox latest version (again identical settings and version as of arch32)

I'm out of ideas at the moment, could it be an arch64 bug?
Thank you in advance

Last edited by onearm (2008-08-10 10:01:31)

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To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
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Snowman

Developer/Forum Fellow

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-08-20

Posts: 5,212

Re: [somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

Maybe you forgot to enable the locale on your arch64 system: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Loc … ry_locales

onearm

Member

From: Anywhere but here

Registered: 2006-07-06

Posts: 359

Website

Re: [somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

No sorry

 >: locale -a
C
italian
it_IT
it_IT@euro
it_IT.iso88591
it_IT.iso885915@euro
it_IT.utf8
POSIX

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To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
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onearm

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From: Anywhere but here

Registered: 2006-07-06

Posts: 359

Website

Re: [somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

Just to add some more info (I'm starting to believe it's a bug), with a new user, without any Xdefaults, vimrc or bashrc, just the default when creating the profile, the problem presents again so it's not even a badly configured urxvt or vim.

As I said, xev and xmodmap -pke report the correct keycodes and are absolutely identical to the ones under arch32 and I didn't experience this problem under Ubuntu64, which it's what make me think it's a bug of arch64. I'll be investigating some more in the next days before giving in....

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To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
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onearm

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From: Anywhere but here

Registered: 2006-07-06

Posts: 359

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Re: [somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

I figured out a way to make Altgr work again, I used xmodmap to change Altgr to Mode_switch instead of ISO_level3_shift and now all works ok (€@#`~ and others). So it's somewhat resolved.

What I don't understand is why ISO_level3_shift works ok under arch32 and doesn't under arch64, I though it was the preferred way in modern xorg instead of Mode_switch.

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To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
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Bebo

Member

From: Göteborg, Sweden

Registered: 2006-06-07

Posts: 207

Re: [somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

I have the same problem with KDEmod 4.1. For instance, my [ and ] characters are accessed through AltGr+8 or AltGr+9,  but now I only get 8 and 9. A bit annoying... This is ordinary 32 bit, not 64, by the way.

onearm, can you please post the relevant part of you xmodmap conf so that I can use it too?

onearm

Member

From: Anywhere but here

Registered: 2006-07-06

Posts: 359

Website

Re: [somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

So it's not just a 64bit problem then...
Here is my .Xmodmap

keycode 113 = Mode_switch

as you see I just took the keycode for AltGr (113 in my case, use xev to see which is in yours) and make it a Mode_switch instead of a ISO_Level3_shift

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To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
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Bebo

Member

From: Göteborg, Sweden

Registered: 2006-06-07

Posts: 207

Re: [somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

Gah, it doesn't work... I took your keycode line and put in .Xmodmap in my home directory, and then I created a script in .kde4/Autostart/ that would run xmodmap .Xmodmap, but it did nothing... Even running xmodmap -e "keycode 113 = Mode_switch" directly does nothing. The quest continues...

<EDIT>
I did run xev first to verify that 113 is AltGr.
</Edit>

Last edited by Bebo (2008-08-12 08:28:18)

Bebo

Member

From: Göteborg, Sweden

Registered: 2006-06-07

Posts: 207

Re: [somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

Eh... When I enable keyboard layouts in KDE, it shows the command it will run to change the layout. For me this command is "setxkbmap -model 105 -layout sv". When I try to run this in a terminal, I get the output "Error loading new keyboard description". So, I ran it with strace and saw that it reads the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg. Looking in this file I noticed that it contains a whole lot of possible configuration values, but _nothing_ for sv! I tried the setxkbmap command with -layout fi instead, and _that_ works - I get my AltGr keys! I have no idea why this happens... Bug?

Bebo

Member

From: Göteborg, Sweden

Registered: 2006-06-07

Posts: 207

Re: [somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

Argh, I a fscking idiot. sv is _not_ Swedish. se works fine...

My apologies for polluting your thread...

simon

Member

Registered: 2005-12-06

Posts: 9

Re: [somewhat solved]AltGr acts strangely

just wanted to say thank you for solving a problem that i've been trying to fix for hours, and nobody else had the answer. my right alt was also set up as ISO_Level3_Shift and like you i've never had problems with this in the past (i'm not using arch, but like you i have have recently switched from a 32 bit to a 64 bit distro, so am also wondering if for some bizarre reason the architecture change requires different keyboard mapping). doing as you suggested and changing the mapping to Mode_switch has fixed several apps that were not honouring the level 3 shift.