Re: [gentoo-user] Numpad keys behaving strange after system-wide update

[Daniel Pielmeier]

Roy Wright schrieb am 03.08.2008 08:10:
> Mark David Dumlao wrote:
>> Hi, I noticed my numpad keys stopped working after doing a system update.
>> The thing is I can't pinpoint what exacly I changed since I did an emerge
>> -uDnav world. I'm sure its some file somewhere...
>>
>> Pressing numpad keys in X doesnt seem to produce results or nothing at all.
>> However, presisng numpad keys seems to work fine on the (non xterm) command
>> line. Did anyone else's numpad appear to break? What do you think I should
>> look up?
>>
>
> This is the symptom I see when I try "evdev" driver and am using a MS
> Natural Pro keyboard.  Briefly the keyboard is handled as two USB
> devices.  The keys that work are on the first device, the ones that
> don't on the second device.  Following gentoo-wiki howtos it looks like
> you have to hack the kernel.  At that point I simply reverted to using
> the "kbd" driver.  Maybe some year evdev will mature...
>
> Quick check, look in your xorg.conf "ServerLayout" section, identify
> which keyboard InputDevice, then check to see which driver it is using.
>
> HTH,
> Roy
>

The new hal version converts the InputDevice section for the keyboard
from xorg.conf to a fdi rule file (/etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-x11-input.fdi)
for hal. Even if you use the kbd driver in xorg.conf it is converted to
use evdev in the fdi file. Now when you use >=xorg-server-1.4 and have
the hal use-flag enabled it will use the evdev driver for the keyboard.

However a bug in the hal-0.5.11 ebuild prevents the conversion to the
fdi file. The ebuild states it has done the conversion but actually has
done nothing, and recommends to remove the InputDevice section in
xorg.conf. So there are chances that there is no rule file and no entry
in xorg.conf. Maybe evdev then does some guessing and guesses wrong.

Regards,

Daniel