[arch-general] xorg crash with setxkbmap frequently use

[Rogutės Sparnuotos]

Sergey Manucharian (2009-05-04 22:42):
> Hi folks,
> 
> X server crashes randomly with the following error:
> 
>  [xkb] BOGUS LENGTH in write keyboard desc, expected 5576, got 5592
> 
> Graphic card is Intel G965, driver xf86-video-intel, tried both from
> [extra] and [testing].
> 
> I'm using the Caps_Lock key to change the keyboard layout via
> a script. I do not want to use
> 
>  "grp:caps_toggle" 
> 
> in xkb options since I need to do something else besides just layout
> switching. My bash script toggles between layouts running
> 
>  "setxkbmap -layout us" or
>  "setxkbmap -layout ru"
> 
> commands depending on the current one. Once in a while X server crashes
> on the toggling. Before I used the "stock" method "grp:caps_toggle",
> and it never crashed.
> 
> Google finds several bug reports with the similar error string, but
> they are not related to layout switching.
> 
> Thanks for ideas!
> 
> Sergey.

This is a bug with xkbcomp and it has been reported upstream long ago.
There is a redhat/fedora bug report [1] (which has been closed, but the
fix didn't work) and a freedesktop.org bug report [2], both assigned to
Peter Hutterer, who seems rather busy (and the bug seems rather
difficult to track down)...

I've seen somebody mention that one could disable the computation of
keyboard geometry and the bug would be avoided, but I'm just trying to
avoid using setxkbmap for the time being.

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=469572
[2] http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20081

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--  Rogutės Sparnuotos