Page 1 of 1

"Caps Lock" key malfunctions in 1.0.4

Posted: Mon 25 Jul 2005, 03:34
by Flash
I'm not certain this is a bug in Puppy 1.0.4, but it is annoying and I don't remember it happening in previous versions of Puppy. It certainly doesn't happen in Windows 2000 on my computer.

What I'm talking about is, tapping my "Caps Lock" key turns on both the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock lights, then it takes three taps of the Caps Lock key to turn them back off. The first click apparently does nothing, the second turns off the Scroll Lock light, and the third turns off the Caps Lock light.

Edit: it's a PS/2 keyboard - and mouse - and I'm running Puppy from CD with a pup001 file on the hard drive, in a Mandrake ext2 partition.

Posted: Mon 25 Jul 2005, 03:45
by Bancobusto
Same here.

Didn't notice it in 1.03, but maybe I just wasn't yelling as much back then. :roll:

Posted: Mon 25 Jul 2005, 03:59
by Lobster
Same here (using PS2 keyboard)

We have had some problems with keyboards in 1.0.4 - so hopefully this will lead to some insights for Barry and G2 and anyone looking at the keyboard script (not even sure where that is?)

8)

Posted: Mon 25 Jul 2005, 04:28
by Walt H
I have basically the same situation, although it only takes two taps after initially turning on Caps Lock. :) The first turns off Scroll Lock, the second turns off Caps Lock. I don't think I had that problem in 1.0.3, but I was running it from a laptop and not on the machine I now have.

Posted: Mon 25 Jul 2005, 10:15
by BarryK
I was also wondering whether this new "feature" was something that I had just not noticed before :?

It has got something to do with the X keyboard extension being enabled in the X server, I think.... dunno what else it could be.
We need to read up on this X keyboard extensions thing... I vaguelly recall reading somewhere that it needs certain config files to function.... maybe they're missing.

Num Lock too. Both keys auto-repeat?!?!

Posted: Tue 26 Jul 2005, 03:07
by Glitchman
I can confirm the Caps Lock behavior here. In addition to that, the Num Lock key requires 2 presses to active / deactivate. Strangely enough, both keys auto-repeat, which is a behavior I haven't seen since the days of telnet sessions on Windows 3.1.

Thank goodness the Caps Lock is the least used key on my keyboard. The Num Lock behavior, on the other hand, is quite annoying.

Alt-Tab is also impacted even more

Posted: Tue 26 Jul 2005, 05:05
by Glitchman
One more thing I noticed since my recent post:

The Alt-Tab key sequence is impacted by this bug as well. I noticed in previous versions of Puppy that I could not Alt-Tab between applications if the Num Lock light was on. Now I can only Alt-Tab when Num Lock is off the "second" time. This reduces its functionality to only work in

Posted: Tue 26 Jul 2005, 06:20
by GuestToo
you can disabe xkeyboard extensions by adding -kb to your X options ( either click the xoptions button in the video wizard, or edit /etc/xextraoptions )

if you do this, your keyboard should work properly again, but the rtl bug will appear (text in gtk2 apps like leafpad and tea and save-boxes will sometimes display from right-to-left instead of from left-to-right)

Posted: Wed 27 Jul 2005, 00:25
by BarryK
This could be a project, if someone is interested...

The configuration files for the X keyboard extension are in /etc/X11/xkbd/, at least on Vector Linux and Mandrake.

There's a lot of stuff in that directory, most of it is unnecessary, but difficult to decide what to dump.
So, boot Austrumi, which is based on Slackware, and see how they have cut that directory down -- they will have kept files to support the Latvian language, so we could maybe cut it down even further.
But, basically, we should be able to copy what Austrumi has straight across the Puppy...

Posted: Wed 27 Jul 2005, 02:12
by GuestToo
i symlinked xkb/ on VL to X11/xkb on Puppy
no effect

so i tried copying the entire folder (about 2 megs) to Puppy, and restarting X and rebooting
no effect

i also tried using xmodmap to change the shift key to F12
no effect
(F12 behaves the same as the Caps Lock key)

i also tried renaming xmodmap so it wouldn't be found
no effect

i don't know a lot about xkb

i thought the patch was so GTK would work properly if xkb was disabled or not installed ... disabling xkb stops the keyboard problem, but the rtl gtk bug appears ... i thought applying the gtk patch is supposed to fix that ... the patch is for gtk-2.6, but it looks like it might be easy to patch 2.4 too

i think this is the patch for gtkentry.c
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cg ... ction=view

Posted: Wed 27 Jul 2005, 03:32
by GuestToo
here's a bug fix for gtk-2.4.0 ... it's not quite the same as the bugzilla patch, but maybe it would work (not that i'm a gtk or C expert)

Posted: Wed 27 Jul 2005, 15:40
by BarryK
Okay, it looks like for pup 1.0.5 I'll have to disable xkbd in /usr/X11R6/bin/xwin, using that "-kb" option.
And, apply the patch to the gtk source.

Posted: Wed 05 Oct 2005, 06:43
by dvw86
I noticed that this bug was not fixed in the final version of 1.0.5. G2, I downloaded you bug fix code, where do I insert it?

Posted: Wed 05 Oct 2005, 07:13
by GuestToo
if you mean my bugfix file for gtk+2.4.0, it's put in gtk+-2.4.0/gtk/gtkentry.c ... i think you should be able to figure out the lines it replaces ... search for
if (pango_dir == PANGO_DIRECTION_NEUTRAL)

i'm no C programming expert, but it looks to me like it should work ... my fix is a little different to their bugfix ... their code seems to set rtl unless reading the value says to use ltr ... i reversed it so the default is ltr unless it specifically says to use rtl

if my fix doesn't work, maybe their fix would work

if it works, you should be able to put -kb in X options, so that the keyboard works properly, and leafpad and save boxes work properly too

Posted: Thu 06 Oct 2005, 01:46
by dvw86
GuestToo wrote:if you mean my bugfix file for gtk+2.4.0, it's put in gtk+-2.4.0/gtk/gtkentry.c ...
I'm sure it's just me, but I can't find the file gtk+-2.4.0/gtk/gtkentry.c

Posted: Thu 06 Oct 2005, 02:22
by GuestToo
i think Puppy 1.0.5 uses gtk-2.4

i downloaded the source
http://www.gtk.org/
http://www.gtk.org/download/
ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.4/

gtkentry.c is one of the source files

Posted: Thu 06 Oct 2005, 19:03
by GuestToo
though it does say on the Puppy News page that
I expect to have GTK 2.6.1 in Puppy 1.0.5
and Rox 2.3 thinks it was compiled with GTK-2.6.1 ... gtk-config thinks it is running 1.2.10 of course ... i don't remember offhand how you check which version of gtk you are running

Posted: Fri 07 Oct 2005, 23:57
by GuestToo
apparently Puppy 1.0.5 (maybe 1.0.4 too) has gtk-2.6.1 ... see: here