Hi,
I have a strange issue. In the BIOS I've set the NumLock to on. During booting it is turned off (huh..), so I have set 'Turn on' 'NumLock on KDE Startup' in KDE.
Since KDE 4.3.4, when I wanted to have quotes ('`"...) I needed to type an extra space. Typically a wrong keyboard lay out was chosen!? I Just enabled 'Enable keyboard layouts' in 'Regional & Language' and didn't change anything. This solved the 'quotes-issue', but it turns off the NumLock-light (NumLock- function is still turned on).
When I leave all keyboard configurations to the defaults (NumLock: Leave unchanged; Keyboard layouts disabled) the keyboard layout is right when at the console (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F2).
Did any one else have seen this strange behavior? Any hints how I can solve this issue?
Thanks,
Martin Kho
Martin Kho wrote:
I have a strange issue. In the BIOS I've set the NumLock to on. During booting it is turned off (huh..), so I have set 'Turn on' 'NumLock on KDE Startup' in KDE.
I reported this bug on October 20, 2008 and it has remained unfixed through all the versions of fedora and rawhide since then. It is bz# 467790. I have tried setting bios numlock on, bios numlock off, kde to on, kde to off, kde to unchanged, but nothing works. Only a couple of weeks ago, after over 2 years of complaining on bugzilla, have I given up. I now have bios off, kde to unchanged, and the system boots with numlock off and I have to expressly turn it on when I use it. Admittedly, as I think the number pad is a bit useless and superfluous anyway, I don't use it much anyway. Prior to about fedora 7 or 6, this used to work correctly.
Since KDE 4.3.4, when I wanted to have quotes ('`"...) I needed to type an extra space. Typically a wrong keyboard lay out was chosen!? I Just enabled 'Enable keyboard layouts' in 'Regional & Language' and didn't change anything. This solved the 'quotes-issue', but it turns off the NumLock-light (NumLock- function is still turned on).
I am not really sure what is going on there and I am not a developer or programming expert. It sounds somewhat like there is a possibility that maybe you might be getting the excellent us-acentos (international) keyboard layout by default. If this is the case and you don't like it, you can disable it in system-settings, regional/keyboard. Enable keyboard layouts and make sure you have the evdev-managed keyboard, no matter what model you really have, select your language below, and under layout variant for your language, choose default to disable the international keyboard.
If you want to give it a try after all, select international (with dead keys). This international is also known as acentos on the command line and it has the advantage of allowing the keys on the keyboard to work like they are supposed to, ie. the accents for many European and other languages really work (you type the accent, then the letter, and the accented character will be typed). When you want the accent typed as a character, then you type the right alt (sometimes AltGr) along with the character (note that many of the accent characters appear on the upper case level, so you have to type right-Alt-Shift plus the accent; I think there is also a way to do this with the space bar preceded by the accent character, but I have not used that method and am not sure exactly how it works).
This takes a day or two to get used to, mainly when using the frequently occurring apostrophe and quotation mark, but once you are used to it, you will wonder how you ever got along without it. It allows you to type names and words correctly without having to enter cryptic codes or using cumbersome tools such as kcharselect to enter the characters.
On Sunday 24 January 2010 20:10:13 Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
Martin Kho wrote:
I have a strange issue. In the BIOS I've set the NumLock to on. During booting it is turned off (huh..), so I have set 'Turn on' 'NumLock on KDE Startup' in KDE.
I reported this bug on October 20, 2008 and it has remained unfixed through all the versions of fedora and rawhide since then. It is bz# 467790. I have tried setting bios numlock on, bios numlock off, kde to on, kde to off, kde to unchanged, but nothing works. Only a couple of weeks ago, after over 2 years of complaining on bugzilla, have I given up. I now have bios off, kde to unchanged, and the system boots with numlock off and I have to expressly turn it on when I use it. Admittedly, as I think the number pad is a bit useless and superfluous anyway, I don't use it much anyway. Prior to about fedora 7 or 6, this used to work correctly.
Since KDE 4.3.4, when I wanted to have quotes ('`"...) I needed to type an extra space. Typically a wrong keyboard lay out was chosen!? I Just enabled 'Enable keyboard layouts' in 'Regional & Language' and didn't change anything. This solved the 'quotes-issue', but it turns off the NumLock-light (NumLock- function is still turned on).
I am not really sure what is going on there and I am not a developer or programming expert. It sounds somewhat like there is a possibility that maybe you might be getting the excellent us-acentos (international) keyboard layout by default. If this is the case and you don't like it, you can disable it in system-settings, regional/keyboard. Enable keyboard layouts and make sure you have the evdev-managed keyboard, no matter what model you really have, select your language below, and under layout variant for your language, choose default to disable the international keyboard.
If you want to give it a try after all, select international (with dead keys). This international is also known as acentos on the command line and it has the advantage of allowing the keys on the keyboard to work like they are supposed to, ie. the accents for many European and other languages really work (you type the accent, then the letter, and the accented character will be typed). When you want the accent typed as a character, then you type the right alt (sometimes AltGr) along with the character (note that many of the accent characters appear on the upper case level, so you have to type right-Alt-Shift plus the accent; I think there is also a way to do this with the space bar preceded by the accent character, but I have not used that method and am not sure exactly how it works).
This takes a day or two to get used to, mainly when using the frequently occurring apostrophe and quotation mark, but once you are used to it, you will wonder how you ever got along without it. It allows you to type names and words correctly without having to enter cryptic codes or using cumbersome tools such as kcharselect to enter the characters.
Hi,
Thanks for your explanation. I'll try your suggestion and will see if I can use to it :-)
Martin Kho
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Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
This takes a day or two to get used to, mainly when using the frequently occurring apostrophe and quotation mark, but once you are used to it, you will wonder how you ever got along without it. It allows you to type names and words correctly without having to enter cryptic codes or using cumbersome tools such as kcharselect to enter the characters.
Yeah, IMHO us-intl should be the default for US locales, I don't see why we're defaulting to legacy monolingual crap.
Kevin Kofler
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Kevin Kofler wrote:
Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
This takes a day or two to get used to, mainly when using the frequently occurring apostrophe and quotation mark, but once you are used to it, you will wonder how you ever got along without it. It allows you to type
names
and words correctly without having to enter cryptic codes or using cumbersome tools such as kcharselect to enter the characters.
Yeah, IMHO us-intl should be the default for US locales, I don't see why we're defaulting to legacy monolingual crap.
The dead keys throw people off. Turning on lv3:ralt_switch_multikey by default wouldn't be bad. Shift+RAlt isn't natural by any means but still has easy access for int'l characters.
Kevin Kofler
- --Ben
Ben Boeckel wrote:
The dead keys throw people off.
They need to get used to it. We can't keep legacy crap forever just to make people happy or we'd still be using typewriters.
Turning on lv3:ralt_switch_multikey by default wouldn't be bad.
+1, but sadly that got turned off by default in most European layouts (where it used to default to on) because it makes Shift+RAlt (in that order) behave (completely) differently than RAlt+Shift (in that order) and people got used to using Shift+AltGr to select the 4th level (and e.g. the Polish layout relies on the 4th level for a commonly-used character (Ł, which ironically I used the Shift+AltGr compose (which I enabled manually) to enter ;-) )).
So there too, a useful feature got disabled by default just to make people happy who don't want to change their legacy habits to adapt to a superior system. :-(
Kevin Kofler
Kevin Kofler wrote:
it makes Shift+RAlt (in that order) behave (completely) differently than RAlt+Shift (in that order)
Now, this is truly odd. Normally, one depresses shift and Alt, or shift and Control, or shift and anything at the same time.
The only place I have ever encountered pressing some modifier key, then releasing it before typing the other keys (to the extent of my memory), is Alt-SysRq+reisub, but I seem to recall that that got changed a while back in how the key combination works, as I now type Alt-SysRq, then I release SysRq but continue holding down the Alt while I type reisub. If I am not mistaken, the old way required you to have 3 hands, as you had to hold both Alt and SysRq down while typing reisub.
(But, as for what) Ben Boeckel wrote:
The dead keys throw people off.
Well, that is simply not true. All over the world, diacritical marks are expected to be dead keys, or they wouldn't work.
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Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
Kevin Kofler wrote:
it makes Shift+RAlt (in that order) behave (completely) differently than RAlt+Shift (in that order)
Now, this is truly odd. Normally, one depresses shift and Alt, or shift and Control, or shift and anything at the same time.
The only place I have ever encountered pressing some modifier key, then releasing it before typing the other keys (to the extent of my memory), is Alt-SysRq+reisub, but I seem to recall that that got changed a while back in how the key combination works, as I now type Alt-SysRq, then I release SysRq but continue holding down the Alt while I type reisub. If I am not mistaken, the old way required you to have 3 hands, as you had to hold both Alt and SysRq down while typing reisub.
Shift+RAlt is a release-before-use modifier. Similar to screen's ^A, ^O in my xmonad setup, and alt+d in plasma these days.
(But, as for what) Ben Boeckel wrote:
The dead keys throw people off.
Well, that is simply not true. All over the world, diacritical marks are expected to be dead keys, or they wouldn't work.
I mean those that have never seen a dead key before. It made it a pain for anyone to use my keyboard at all. I don't type them enough to need the keys to be dead, but enough that they need to be available. Maybe there should be a "how often do you type int'l chars"? option?
- --Ben
On Sun, 2010-01-24 at 12:10 -0700, Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
I think there is also a way to do this with the space bar preceded by the accent character, but I have not used that method and am not sure exactly how it works).
It works like you just said. Type ' a and you get 'a Type 'a and you get á
I'm so used to it I type a space automatically after the apostrophe unless I want an accent, and I actually have one in my name so I do it a lot :-)
poc
Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
I actually have one in my name
The proper (non-anglicized) spelling of my name has an umlauted u (ü), so I also use it a lot.
Kevin Kofler wrote:
IMHO us-intl should be the default for US locales, I don't see why we're defaulting to legacy monolingual crap.
I agree 100%.
More and more people are not anglicizing their names when they move to Canada, as they once did until the 50s, when my family immigrated; Canada is officially bilingual, hence the need for 2 types of keyboards, yet us-intl (also sometimes shown as us-acentos) will correctly handle all Western, and likely most Eastern European languages, plus a good number of other languages as well; the world is becoming increasingly interconnected, particularly textually, through the Internet; and there is absolutely no inconvenience to using a keyboard with all of its functions intact.
Kevin Kofler wrote:
You should try the German layout, we have a dedicated 'ü' key.
Yes, before I moved back to Canada, I picked up a Cherry German keyboard and I used to use the German layout with it, but I no longer have that old PS/2 keyboard.
Now, I just use the locally available US keyboards and make due with the US- International layout. I don't miss the German keyboard anymore, and when writing in French, I find that the US-International layout is just as flexible/universal as writing French on a German keyboard (where dead keys are enabled by default). Ça marche très bien comme ça, daß ich garkein Bedürfniß für eine deutsche Tastatur habe.
On Sun, 2010-01-24 at 20:04 -0700, Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
I actually have one in my name
The proper (non-anglicized) spelling of my name has an umlauted u (ü), so I also use it a lot.
Kevin Kofler wrote:
IMHO us-intl should be the default for US locales, I don't see why we're defaulting to legacy monolingual crap.
I agree 100%.
More and more people are not anglicizing their names when they move to Canada, as they once did until the 50s, when my family immigrated; Canada is officially bilingual, hence the need for 2 types of keyboards, yet us-intl (also sometimes shown as us-acentos) will correctly handle all Western, and likely most Eastern European languages, plus a good number of other languages as well; the world is becoming increasingly interconnected, particularly textually, through the Internet; and there is absolutely no inconvenience to using a keyboard with all of its functions intact.
I just select it at install time, but I don't know that I would support it *by default*. Imagine the newbies screaming that their keyboard doesn't work :-)
poc
Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
I just select it at install time, but I don't know that I would support it *by default*. Imagine the newbies screaming that their keyboard doesn't work :-)
And the answer to that would be: "GNU/Linux is different, it doesn't work the same way as Winblow$, get over it or leave."
In fact, to resolve the "zap X server" combo debate once and for all, why not have the left Winblow$ key zap the X server? ^^ "Surprise!" :-p OK, that's a bit extreme… ;-)
Kevin Kofler
On Mon, 2010-01-25 at 15:55 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
I just select it at install time, but I don't know that I would support it *by default*. Imagine the newbies screaming that their keyboard doesn't work :-)
And the answer to that would be: "GNU/Linux is different, it doesn't work the same way as Winblow$, get over it or leave."
Yes, that'll really pull in the new users. Not. We could go round and round on this, but my view is that it's pragmatically sensible to make things work as the user expects (sometimes called the "Principle Of Least Astonishment") as long as it doesn't cause major problems. Anyone who wants to type Latin1 characters can easily find out how to do it, whereas many naive users think of the computer a glorified typewriter. We want to encourage them, not alienate them. Look at all the yelling about the KDE4 desktop (plasma) model, which is somewhat different from what people are used to, and that's among users who presumably have a certain level of technical knowledge.
In fact, to resolve the "zap X server" combo debate once and for all, why not have the left Winblow$ key zap the X server? ^^ "Surprise!" :-p OK, that's a bit extreme… ;-)
I don't even have that key.
poc
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Ben Boeckel -
Kevin Kofler -
Martin Kho -
Patrick O'Callaghan -
Petrus de Calguarium