Guest fiomba Posted October 28, 2004 Report Share Posted October 28, 2004 I am a new member of this forum and also almost new of Linux. I hope to receive some help from experts... (in other forums...no significant answers till now!). This thread is specific for Mandrake distro (but perhaps can be used by other Linux's flavours). I wanted to insert new symbols with "compose" key combinations on my keyboard... I began my investigation studying the boot process by examinating the logs /var/logs/messages After isolating the messages relating to the last boot (you have about 20 Mb of messages...), I searched for the keyword "keymap", and I found that us.kmap.gz is loaded two times from /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.kmap.gz (I have a USA keyboard without Win keys). Together with us.kmap (see below) # us.kmap keymaps 0-2,4-6,8-9,12 alt_is_meta include "qwerty-layout" include "linux-with-alt-and-altgr" strings as usual keycode 1 = Escape keycode 2 = one exclam keycode 3 = two at at nul nul keycode 4 = three numbersign control keycode 4 = Escape keycode 5 = four dollar dollar Control_backslash keycode 6 = five percent control keycode 6 = Control_bracketright keycode 7 = six asciicircum control keycode 7 = Control_asciicircum keycode 8 = seven ampersand braceleft Control_underscore keycode 9 = eight asterisk bracketleft Delete keycode 10 = nine parenleft bracketright keycode 11 = zero parenright braceright keycode 12 = minus underscore backslash Control_underscore Control_underscore keycode 13 = equal plus keycode 14 = Delete keycode 15 = Tab keycode 26 = bracketleft braceleft control keycode 26 = Escape keycode 27 = bracketright braceright asciitilde Control_bracketright keycode 28 = Return alt keycode 28 = Meta_Control_m keycode 29 = Control keycode 39 = semicolon colon keycode 40 = apostrophe quotedbl control keycode 40 = Control_g keycode 41 = grave asciitilde control keycode 41 = nul keycode 42 = Shift keycode 43 = backslash bar control keycode 43 = Control_backslash keycode 51 = comma less keycode 52 = period greater keycode 53 = slash question control keycode 53 = Delete keycode 54 = Shift keycode 56 = Alt keycode 57 = space control keycode 57 = nul keycode 58 = Caps_Lock keycode 86 = less greater bar keycode 97 = Control the boot process loads also: /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/include/compose.latin.inc.gz The us.kmap seems merely a scancode list, but why load it twice? More interesting is the associated "compose.latin.inc.gz", which is too big to list. Only some lines...: # # Default compose file # # Those compose lines can be shared between latin1, 2 and 3. They give good # results. compose '!' '!' to '¡' compose '"' 'A' to 'Ä' compose '"' 'E' to 'Ë' compose '"' 'I' to 'Ï' compose '"' 'O' to 'Ö' compose '"' 'U' to 'Ü' By means of: hexdump -Cv compose.latin.inc which output is: 00000000 23 0a 23 20 44 65 66 61 75 6c 74 20 63 6f 6d 70 |#.# Default comp| 00000010 6f 73 65 20 66 69 6c 65 0a 23 0a 23 20 54 68 6f |ose file.#.# Tho| 00000020 73 65 20 63 6f 6d 70 6f 73 65 20 6c 69 6e 65 73 |se compose lines| 00000030 20 63 61 6e 20 62 65 20 73 68 61 72 65 64 20 62 | can be shared b| 00000040 65 74 77 65 65 6e 20 6c 61 74 69 6e 31 2c 20 32 |etween latin1, 2| 00000050 20 61 6e 64 20 33 2e 20 54 68 65 79 20 67 69 76 | and 3. They giv| 00000060 65 20 67 6f 6f 64 0a 23 20 72 65 73 75 6c 74 73 |e good.# results| 00000070 2e 0a 63 6f 6d 70 6f 73 65 20 27 21 27 20 27 21 |..compose '!' '!| 00000080 27 20 74 6f 20 27 a1 27 0a 63 6f 6d 70 6f 73 65 |' to '¡'.compose| 00000090 20 27 22 27 20 27 41 27 20 74 6f 20 27 c4 27 0a | '"' 'A' to 'Ä'.| 000000a0 63 6f 6d 70 6f 73 65 20 27 22 27 20 27 45 27 20 |compose '"' 'E' | 000000b0 74 6f 20 27 cb 27 0a 63 6f 6d 70 6f 73 65 20 27 |to 'Ë'.compose '| 000000c0 22 27 20 27 49 27 20 74 6f 20 27 cf 27 0a 63 6f |"' 'I' to 'Ï'.co| 000000d0 6d 70 6f 73 65 20 27 22 27 20 27 4f 27 20 74 6f |mpose '"' 'O' to| 000000e0 20 27 d6 27 0a 63 6f 6d 70 6f 73 65 20 27 22 27 | 'Ö'.compose '"'| 000000f0 20 27 55 27 20 74 6f 20 27 dc 27 0a 63 6f 6d 70 | 'U' to 'Ü'.comp| you can see that '¡' is hex 'a1' (that is only one byte: the acute accented 'i') and so on. Make a comparison with the Extended ASCII Table (Code Page 850). My question is (at last... you can say): How can I use the Compose key combinations to obtain the listed characters (and the others)? It seems that an extended mapping is already loaded, but it doesn't match: For example: normal characters: `1234567890-= qwertyuiop[] asdfghjkl;' zxcvbnm,./ AltGr + " ¬¹²³¼½¾{[]}\ @łe¶ŧ←↓→øþ æßðđŋħjĸł «»¢“”nµ· AltGr+Shift+char ¬¡⅛£$⅜⅝⅞™±°¿ ΩŁE®Ŧ¥↑ıØÞ Æ§ÐªŊĦJ&Ł <>©`'Nº×÷ For AltGr I mean the Alt key on the right. If I could replicate the key combinations of "compose.latin.inc.gz", I could choose the combinations that interest to me (writing a new "compose.latin.inc.gz")... ... or do you know from where come out the key combinations already present on the keyboard? During my attempts to get useful key combinations, I realized that my keyboard was setted as USA and so I changed to International (from the Control Center of Mandrake). From that point on, I lost the AltGr key combinations (you can see a few lines above) but I got the "dead" keys (also if I don´t want them!). The keymap files that are loaded during boot are: /usr/lib/kdb/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us-latin1.kmap.gz /usr/lib/kdb/keymaps/include/compose.latin.inc.gz To go back to previous situation, it is sufficient to reset the keyboard as USA. So I did to get rid off the hateful "dead" keys... For those who don't know what is the "dead" key technique, a brief explanation: to use particular keys (ticks, tilde and so on) to obtain accented letters. When you press a dead key nothing appears (it seems dead), only when you press the following key (generally a vowel) you see the effect of the dead key (in form of various forms of accent). If you want to use the tick (for example to define a string) you must press twice the key (utterly inconceivable!). A last note: the AltGr key combinations generate mostly Unicode symbols or something like that because Linux refuses to make a backup of the (long!) post on hard disk. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted October 29, 2004 Report Share Posted October 29, 2004 I can see you're new to Linux but not new to computers :). However, a DE (desktop environment) like KDE recognizes most keyboards and keyboard layouts. In the KDE Control Center-->Region & Accessability-->Keyboard layout you can make any kind of combination. (the same will go for Gnome) Further KDE uses khotkeys with wich you can bind 'actions' to the keys. (very helpfull when you have a multimdia keyboard with tons of buttons). Last, the best place to ask questions about the use of keyboards under Linux are the XFree (or now Xorg) mailinglists. The handling of keyboards is a part of X. Good luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest fiomba Posted October 29, 2004 Report Share Posted October 29, 2004 Thanks for your suggestions (you are one of the very few Linux experts who has given me meaningful suggestions). But what you are suggesting (the path to reach the kde keyboard configuration items is somewhat different...) are not immediately useful. To a newbie like me they seems more "action" configuration (like Control C for Copy to the Clipboard). Besides that I have in mind to act "before" KDE" (almost at kernel configuration level...). I am almost sure (... but I am a newbie!) that there is some method to modify configuration files to make the keyboard act as I want. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted October 29, 2004 Report Share Posted October 29, 2004 Disclaimer: I'm not an expert, just a 'heavy' user. :) http://www.mail-archive.com/devel@xfree86.org/msg03359.html This post tells how someone got some keys on his keyboard to function. With xmodmap -kp you can get all the keycodes for all the characters on your keyboard. Maybe you can combine the 2 and get what you want? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest fiomba Posted October 29, 2004 Report Share Posted October 29, 2004 If you are a 'heavy' user, I am a very "light " user... I thank you for the html ref (I will read it). Unfortunately I am not able to transmit the importance of what I am trying to do, that is to obtain foreign symbols (accented letteers, euro symbol and so on) without using the "dead" keys technique... Probably for English or American people, that is not very important... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kjel Oslund Posted October 29, 2004 Report Share Posted October 29, 2004 One way to set up your system to allow typing of accented characters is to select one of the language specific keyboards using Mandrake Control Center->Hardware->Keyboard. If you want a general purpose keyboard select "US keyboard (international)". When set to that layout, for example, if you type ' followed by e you will get é. In those instances where you want to type that sequence but do not want an accented character, you have to type a space after the accent before typing the accent-able character. Most common accented characters seem to be available, but I haven't explored this facility fully so I can't tell if this will work for you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest fiomba Posted October 29, 2004 Report Share Posted October 29, 2004 thanks of your observations, but I think that you have not read my 1st post till the end... What you are suggesting is indeed the "dead" key technique, that I don't love too much... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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