Re: Cygwin X + HP-UX 11.11 + italian keyboard = AltGr not working (solved/worked around)

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

Thanks very much for posting your work around.

On 08/07/2011 09:18, Danilo Turina wrote:
> Fiddling aroung with Wireshark I was able to understand what the problem was
> and I had the confirm thanks to xmodmap.
> 
> With Xming I had that keycode 34 ("è") is associated to
> 
>     egrave eacute bracketleft braceleft bracketleft braceleft
> 
> while with CygwinX the association is
> 
>     egrave eacute egrave eacute bracketleft braceleft
> 
> I don't know the exact meaning of each of the positions above, but with

This is (sort of) explained in 'man xmodmap'

>                The  list of keysyms is assigned to the indicated keycode (which may be specified in decimal,
>                hex or octal and can be determined by running the xev program).  Up to eight keysyms  may  be
>                attached  to  a key, however the last four are not used in any major X server implementation.
>                The first keysym is used when no modifier key is pressed in conjunction with  this  key,  the
>                second  with  Shift,  the third when the Mode_switch key is used with this key and the fourth
>                when both the Mode_switch and Shift keys are used.

However, you have to remember that what you see with xmodmap isn't the real
XKB keymap, but a compatibility xmodmap invented by XKB for clients which
don't know about XKB.

> xmodmap -e "keycode 34 = egrave eacute bracketleft braceleft bracketleft
> braceleft"
> 
> I solved the problem.
> I then saw that that solves the problem even without setting XKB_DISABLE but
> only with some applications (e.g. with xterm works, with nedit you need
> XKB_DISABLE set).
> 
> So just executing the xmodmap above for keycode 34, also within the same xterm
> on which I had the problem, without setting XKB_DISABLE and without doing
> anything else (so not resetting of the modifiers with 'xmodmap -e "clear
> mod5"', etc.), it works (but better setting XKB_DISABLE=1 in order to make all
> clients work).
> 
> In short:
> 
> export XKB_DISABLE=1
> xmodmap -e "keycode 34 = egrave eacute bracketleft braceleft bracketleft
> braceleft"
> xmodmap -e "keycode 35 = plus asterisk bracketright braceright bracketright
> braceright"
> xmodmap -e "keycode 48 = agrave degree numbersign dead_abovering numbersign
> dead_abovering numbersign dead_abovering"
> xmodmap -e "keycode 47 = ograve ccedilla at dead_cedilla at dead_cedilla at
> dead_cedilla ograve ccedilla at dead_cedilla"
> 
> does the job (with the above I just fix the four keys needed to get "[", "{",
> "]", "}", "@" and "#", probably others are missing, like AltGr+E for the Euro
> sign, but I don't use them within HP-UX so no problem for me).
> 
> WARNING WARNING WARNING: I wrote the above xmodmap statements by getting their
> values from "xmodmap -pk" and replacing the 3rd and 4th values with the 5th
> and 6th values, so I don't know whether they can cause problems in other
> contexts. I hope that somebody that better knows xmodmap (and the like) could
> confirm the correctness of the above (that anyway for me works, so I have no
> problems at all now).
> 
> I don't know whether this is a symptom of a wrong keymap on the Cygwin X side
> or is a problem on HP-UX, but I don't really care at this point.

Fair enough.  I wish I understood what was going on here better so I could
improve what Cygwin/X FAQ 5.1.8 [1] says.

[1] http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-faq.html#alt-gr-with-old-x

> 
> Thank you very much for the support and the precious hints.
> Ciao,
>     Danilo
> 
> P.S. If I had looked more carefully at "xmodmap -pk" output at the beginning,
> I would have discovered the problem early and I would have avoided all of this
> researching and trying.

-- 
Jon TURNEY
Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer

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