[arch-general] Odd Problem After Install

[lee]

Hunter Jozwiak <hunter.t.joz at gmail.com> writes:

> This is an odd issue. I'm not sure why GDM or Lightdm are misbehaving
> like this; this is a brand new issue and I am not sure as to the
> culprate. There are, in fact, lines below the cleaning status. Looks
> to me like part of the init process: I see a two lines from netctl
> saying that it is restoring my profile, another saying that I've
> reached the default user runlevel, and another that says starting
> target graphical interface. I've reinstalled xorg, but am not sure as
> to what must be configured.

First you need to make sure that your keyboard is specified correctly.
With switching to consoles, that particularly involves 102 vs. 105 keys
(or however many keys there are).

Keep in mind that the system (consoles) and the GUI (X11) can have
totally different opinions about what keyboard is connected.  They also
use different ways to set up keybord layouts (like loadkeys vs. xmodmap
vs. xinput).

Window managers don't interfere with this.  So-called desktop
environments usually tend to mess up your keyboard configuration because
they are insisting to use what they want and ignore your own
configuration, like xmodmaps loaded from ~/.xinitrc.


I don't know what is used in arch to set up the keyboard.  Try something
like 'find /etc/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i "pc.*10[0-9]" |
less' to find configuration files which might be relevant.

Once your keyboard is specified correctly, turn off all so-called
display managers like GDM and use startx to start an X11 session.  Do
not start any of the so-called desktop environments.  Try to switch to a
console.  If you can't switch, quit the X11 session, configure your
keyboard correctly and try again until it works.  You may need to use an
xorg.conf to specify something like:


Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
    Option         "XKBOptions" "ctrl:nocaps"
#    Option         "XkbModel" "pc105"                                                                                                                                                                                                       
    Option         "XkbModel" "pc102"
    Option         "XkbLayout" "de"
EndSection


When you are sure that your keyboard is set up correctly, switch back to
X11, open an xterm and examine the output of 'xmodmap -pke'.  You can
save that to a file like ~/.Xmodmap which can be loaded any time with
xmodmap.

If you want to modify your keyboard layout, you can use xev to see what
keys you're pressing and edit your .Xmodmap.  Next time you start a
so-called desktop environment, you can load your .Xmodmap and your
keyboard should work as expected.

However, it will never work right unless you set it up right on the
console first.  To make this more fun, the way the keyboard is set up
changes from time to time, without notice, and there are at least three
different places to configure the keyboard.


-- 
Knowledge is volatile and fluid.  Software is power.