Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

ccaaee · Joined: 27 Feb 2010 Posts: 22

The french keymap seems to be left out of Racy

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Puppy Linux. But I'm about to go crazy trying to get a french keyboard to work in Racy. Normally this shouldn't be too hard but try navigating using a keyboard where all the (\|/?.>< Wink

s can't be found.

Could anyone please tell me what files I have to put in what paths so I could at least type setxkbmap fr.

Thanks

ccaaee

npierce · Joined: 28 Dec 2009 Posts: 637

The version of xkbcomp in Racy 5.2.2 has trouble interpreting the symbols file for the fr layout. This confuses it and causes it to give a misleading error message:

npierce · Joined: 28 Dec 2009 Posts: 637

I made some time to look into this further.

This problem does, in fact, result from a bug in xkbcomp.

The good news is that somebody already wrote a patch to fix this.

The bad news is that the patch was never applied.

In June of 2010, somebody made some modifications to xkbscan.c, part of the source for xkbcomp. He decided to "Use fread() instead of getc()". While that was a good idea, he inadvertently introduced this bug.

Apparently the function he wrote that used fread() used an array of chars for the buffer, and returned one char from that buffer. The problem was that the char 0xff equates to -1, which is also used to indicate end of file, so this confused the caller. (The function he replaced, getc() returns an integer, and since int 0xff equates to 256, the caller could distinguish it from EOF.)

OK, I've probably given more detail than necessary here already, but if curious you can see the discussion at: http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/3671/

There was some discussion about reverting the changes that caused this bug, instead of keeping them and applying the patch. Perhaps they never decided which to do, and so did neither.

I have tried the latest xkbcomp (xkbcomp 1.2.3, dated 2011-06-24) which I found in the package x11-xkb-utils (7.6+4). This version still fails.

And the current source code for xkbscan.c at cgit.freedesktop.org (dated 2011-12-29) has not had the patch applied.

I have written to Matthieu Herrb, who reviewed the patch back in January 2011, to alert him to this. Perhaps he will finally get this fixed.

In the meantime, the modified symbol file (fr) that I posted earlier should solve the immediate problem.

esmourguit · Posted: Thu 16 Feb 2012, 07:38 Post subject:

Bonjour à tous,

A big thank you npierce, I could get the French keyboard. BK has posted a package see his blog

Cordialement,
Wink

Pelo

The problem is still here. Why hav'nt you corrected the ISO in your repositery ? This morning I decided to trash it as soon i have to burn a new one.

Further more the distro does not bring lot of improvment. Tonight, i shall repair it with french keyboard, it gives it a chance to survive.

Racy 5.3.3 is very safe, no problem, but i like some fantasy time to time.

Dom Pelo de Franciano, no ! trash !

Pelo

pourriez-vous sortir une distro avec un clavier en ou us ne fonctionnant pas ?

Do you imagine releasing a new puppy with us keyboard not working ? NO ? Some puppies still release without fr keyboard. People dont test before ? (on major languages). Are puppies for the poor people with old computers or for very clever students speaking english and computing very well ?
I love Puppies, nevertheless.

Pelo

But tell it to Macpup (529 issue) to verify keymaps. Thanks for coop. Merci beaucoup.