This is the mail archive of the cygwin-xfree mailing list for the Cygwin XFree86 project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: Cygwin X + HP-UX 11.11 + italian keyboard = AltGr not working


On 06/07/2011 16.02, Jon TURNEY wrote:
On 06/07/2011 09:15, Danilo Turina wrote:
     having recently replaced my old keyboard (that had a US layout) with an
italian one, I'm having a problem with Cygwin X when running HP-UX clients:
AltGr does not work and this prevents me to use characters like "[" "{" "}"
"]", etc.

I'm up to date with Cygwin and Cygwin X at the moment ("1.7.9(0.237/5/3)
2011-03-29 10:10 i686 Cygwin" for Cygwin and "1.10.2.0" for XWin).

These are the steps to reproduce the problem:

     1) start Cygwin X
     2) disable access control ("xhost +")
     3) access via telnet/ssh a HP-UX machine
     4) open an xterm from the HP-UX machine in Cygwin X
     5) in the newly opened xterm try to use AltGr (AltGr + "è" (i.e. the key
at the right of "P"), should produce "{", while AltGr + Shift + "è" should
produce "{")

I'm missing here what is actually produced. Nothing? or the unmodified è?

The unmodified è (well, sort of, because when I press "è" on the keyboard I see on the terminal "I" (I think because of some other problem of the terminal with non-ASCII chars) and if I press AltGr+"è" I yet see "I", so it's just like pressing AltGr has no effect at all).



6) fall on the floor crying in desperation

This is perfectly normal for people having to deal with XKB :-)


Notice that when using a client from a Linux machine all works properly.

A googled a lot and found a lot of information but only few of it applied
(=helped) to my specific case. I tried to mess with xmodmap and kbd config
files and also with other stuff, but nothing seemed to solve the problem.

I think a solution is contained in this old mailing list post [1], use XKB_DISABLE=1 and adjust the keyboard map so that AltGr is Mode_switch and the keys have the expected mapping in group 2, activated via Mode_switch.

Note that just reassigning AltGr to Mode_switch is not enough, you'll need to
remap appropriately the keys which generate different characters with AltGr
e.g. something like:

xmodmap -e "clear mod5"
xmodmap -e "clear mod3"
xmodmap -e "keycode 113 = Mode_switch Multi_key"
xmodmap -e "add mod3 = Mode_switch"
xmodmap -e "keycode 34 = egrave eacute bracketleft braceleft"
(and so on for the other keys which need to generate different characters with
AltGr)

I already encountered some like that while searching the internet but didn't work.
I tried what you wrote here but didn't work either...


Is there anything that I can do to go deeper into the analysis of this problem? xev seems not of any help, since it returns the same results both for Xming where all works and Cygwin X where I have the problem.

Ciao,
	Danilo


I can't test this, because I don't have access to a HP-UX machine.


[1] http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2004-03/msg00454.html

At the moment I'm using Xming 6.9.0.31 that doesn't seem affected by the
problem IF I set XKB_DISABLE=1 on the client machine (i.e. HP-UX).

Trying to troubleshoot the problem, I used xev on the HP-UX machine to see if
the keys were properly recognized and, in effect, they are.
This are xev results for Cygwin X, when I press (and release) AltGr+è (thus by
trying to get "[") with XKB_DISABLED not set:

[snip]

If I set XKB_DISABLED=1, I get, instead:


[snip]

If I try xev on Xming with XKB_DISABLED=1 (where I have no problem at all), I get:

[snip]

It's kind of hard to know how to interpret these results since I don't know
what XKB_DISABLED=1 actually does.


One strange thing that I noticed is that if I start Cygwin X by using
"startxwin" from the Cygwin's command line, I get the following warning on
screen:
[snip]
The XKEYBOARD keymap compiler (xkbcomp) reports:
Warning:          Type "ONE_LEVEL" has 1 levels, but<RALT>  has 2 symbols
                   Ignoring extra symbols

But that warning is not present in XWin.0.log (attached).

I think this is normal, if a little odd. Warnings from xkbocmp are written to stdout, but not written to the log.


-- DANILO TURINA ALCATEL-LUCENT Software Analyst NM System Team Network-Optics Rieti (Italy) Phone: +39 0746 600332

10 anni 2 mesi 27 giorni 6 ore 42 minuti 8 secondi

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://x.cygwin.com/docs/
FAQ:                   http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]