Trouble with laptop keyboard on Packard Bell EasyNote R4
 

Hi people

I'm having trouble with the keyboard on the Packard Bell EasyNote R4. I'm using the standard xorg driver that gets configured by the Debian Lenny installer and the problem is that the keys sometimes generate weird keycodes or something, causing unwanted behaviour of the window manager (XFCE 4.4) such as creating a new terminal window or shading windows. Could the keyboard be faulty or does someone know of a driver that would work better with this model?

Thanks,
Ingvald Johansen

I've heard nobody complain about the driver.
What everyone complains about is locales, settings. Basically there's a whole mess of stuff linking character sets with locales(local set up stuff for where you live), and then some bright spark came along with unicode, and that went in with extreme difficulty. There's also Xmodmap, xev, and other ways of getting the character you want on the key you want.

The basic problem is that from the 256 possible combinations, you want all the latin, arabic, cyrillic, & chinese character sets printable somewhere in the world. Some geeks landed in the (slightly different) Gaelic alphabet, and Klingon is on UTF-8 :-/.

So what you're basically saying is that my keyboard is faulty? I did suspect that, although I was hoping there would be alternative drivers available somewhere.

As for locale I've got Scandinavian and Cyrillic working fine without having lifted a finger to make that happen. That's a great improvement btw since the last time I used Linux in 2007. The keyboard seems to generate ctrl sequences though that makes programs do unexpected things. Using a USB keyboard solves that problem.

No, I'm not saying that.
If you have unexpected keycodes coming up, I really feel it is likely to be a Locale problem

Well thanks for the tip. I will have a look at the locale settings and maybe try different locales.