Re: Cygwin X + HP-UX 11.11 + italian keyboard = AltGr not working

[Jon TURNEY <jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk>]

On 06/07/2011 15:26, Danilo Turina wrote:
> On 06/07/2011 16.02, Jon TURNEY wrote:
>> On 06/07/2011 09:15, Danilo Turina wrote:
>>>      having recently replaced my old keyboard (that had a US layout) with an
>>> italian one, I'm having a problem with Cygwin X when running HP-UX clients:
>>> AltGr does not work and this prevents me to use characters like "[" "{" "}"
>>> "]", etc.
>>>
>>> I'm up to date with Cygwin and Cygwin X at the moment ("1.7.9(0.237/5/3)
>>> 2011-03-29 10:10 i686 Cygwin" for Cygwin and "1.10.2.0" for XWin).
>>>
>>> These are the steps to reproduce the problem:
>>>
>>>      1) start Cygwin X
>>>      2) disable access control ("xhost +")
>>>      3) access via telnet/ssh a HP-UX machine
>>>      4) open an xterm from the HP-UX machine in Cygwin X
>>>      5) in the newly opened xterm try to use AltGr (AltGr + "è" (i.e. the key
>>> at the right of "P"), should produce "{", while AltGr + Shift + "è" should
>>> produce "{")
>>
>> I'm missing here what is actually produced.  Nothing? or the unmodified è?
> 
> The unmodified è (well, sort of, because when I press "è" on the keyboard I
> see on the terminal "I" (I think because of some other problem of the terminal
> with non-ASCII chars) and if I press AltGr+"è" I yet see "I", so it's just
> like pressing AltGr has no effect at all).
> 
>>
>>>      6) fall on the floor crying in desperation
>>
>> This is perfectly normal for people having to deal with XKB :-)
>>
>>> Notice that when using a client from a Linux machine all works properly.
>>>
>>> A googled a lot and found a lot of information but only few of it applied
>>> (=helped) to my specific case. I tried to mess with xmodmap and kbd config
>>> files and also with other stuff, but nothing seemed to solve the problem.
>>
>> I think a solution is contained in this old mailing list post [1], use
>> XKB_DISABLE=1 and adjust the keyboard map so that AltGr is Mode_switch and the
>> keys have the expected mapping in group 2, activated via Mode_switch.
>>
>> Note that just reassigning AltGr to Mode_switch is not enough, you'll need to
>> remap appropriately the keys which generate different characters with AltGr
>> e.g. something like:
>>
>> xmodmap -e "clear mod5"
>> xmodmap -e "clear mod3"
>> xmodmap -e "keycode 113 = Mode_switch Multi_key"
>> xmodmap -e "add mod3 = Mode_switch"
>> xmodmap -e "keycode 34 = egrave eacute bracketleft braceleft"
>> (and so on for the other keys which need to generate different characters with
>> AltGr)
> 
> I already encountered some like that while searching the internet but didn't
> work.
> I tried what you wrote here but didn't work either...

Just to be clear, you probably have to do all this before you start the xterm
you are going to be working in.

Can I see the xev output when you try that setup?

> Is there anything that I can do to go deeper into the analysis of this
> problem? xev seems not of any help, since it returns the same results both for
> Xming where all works and Cygwin X where I have the problem.

Yes, that's rather mystifying.

You might consider using wireshark, xmon or xscope to examine the protocol
interactions between client and server (not sure if all of these can decode
XKB extension protocol) to see if there is any difference there.

It seems that XKB_DISABLE is checked for inside libX11 (at least since R6.6,
the oldest version in freedesktop.org git), so you might want to identify what
version is on your HP-UX host and try to understand how it behaves.  It might
also be worthwhile to look forward in the version history to see if there's
been a fix made for this behavior?

Lastly, I notice that HP-UX 11.11 is apparently still in support, so you might
actually ask HP to fix it :-)

-- 
Jon TURNEY
Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer

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