Hi

I just upgraded from RH 7.3 to RH 8 and I have a silly problem, but a seriously annoying one. Everytime I hit the altgr (or right alt) key it outputs a character. This key is used on international keyboards to generate special keys like, in the case of the Belgian keyboard I use, braces, brackets and pipes. You can understand it's very difficult to code in C++ or Java with this problem.

I have investigated as much as I could but I'm in an impasse. It seems the key down event generates a 0x30 scancode after the 0x0e 0x38 scancode for altgr. It generates a 0 on the console, and a double quote on X. I don't know how "abnormal" that is because I own this keyboard since some time now and never had any problem (Win2000 works fine on another partition of the same computer, and previously RH7.3 worked fine).

I've tried to configure the keyboard using different combinations in X's keyboard config, but it's always the same.

It seems that the combination alt-gr+alpha keys generates some special keys (on X), which is not usual for this kind of keyboard. Actually hitting altgr+b generates the double quote, and as 0x30 is indeed the scnacode for b this is all coherent. A very acceptable workaround might be to disable this combination on X but I couldn't find how to do it, because these combinations appear in no key mapping file that I could locate.

Has anyone any useful information on any of this ? I would be eternally grateful !

Hi, I've got exactly the same problem with some no name keyboard and french (AZERTY) layout. Under KDE 3.0.3 I was able to select another keyboard in the config panel ("fr" instead of "fr-latin1") and it worked fine.

For the console mode I found some workaround by using Alt instead of AltGr (not very beautiful, but who cares):

1) Copy the keymap file /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/azerty/fr.map.gz (or whatever keymap you use) to fr-modified.map.gz

2) To use Alt instead of AltGr to accesss the characters that are usually accessed by pressing AltGr (like #,|,etc...), change all of the lines as in the following example :

alt keycode 9 = Meta_eight
should be replaced by
alt keycode 9 = backslash

and

alt keycode 7 = Meta_six
becomes
alt keycode 7 = bar
.
.
.
(and so on, the keycodes might be different in your keycode file)

3) map the AltGr key to the Alt function : setkeycodes e038 56 (superuser mode only)

e038 is the scan code for my AltGr key, it might be different for you, use showkey -s to find out which code your keyboard produces. 56 is the code for "Alt" in my fr.map.gz file, verify if that's the same for you. (You can also use showkey to find it out)

4) load the modified keymap: loadkeys -s fr-mod

Now pressing AltGr and "8" should result in a backslash. You can of course as well use the standard Alt key now, as they are mapped to the same keycode. If you need the Alt+Number for console programs (I personally don't need them), consider using shift-alt or ctrl-alt instead of only Alt.

Cheers
Seb.

All right, I had the same problem with my belgian keyboard under redhat 8.0. Jerked around a little, and found the (incredibly simple) solution. Just run "kbdconfig" from the console, and instead of choosing "be-latin", just choose "azerty". Solved the problem for me

Don't know if it'll work with a french keyboard configuration, but should be worth a try as well...