Backspace produces "^?" after upgrading to FC3
 

Juding from the Fedora mailing lists I'm the only person on Earth with this problem, but ever since upgrading to FC3 my backspace key produces a ^? in terminal programs. The most irritating is vim, but it also happens at login prompts. I happens in every terminal program and even on remote terminals, but never in GUI programs. It's slowly driving me crazy...

I have 3 computers running FC3, but only my Dell Latitude D600 has this problem. I read about people having this problem in vim, but my problem isn't limited to vim or local terminals. None the less I tried messing with the vim config files, but nothing has helped.

Has anyone else seen or heard of this? Any ideas how to fix it?

This may not qualify even as a clue, but I've noticed ever since starting to use Linux almost two years ago, then whenever I boot (and am in verbose mode, of course) I get the message "Backspace key produces ^?" two or three times during the process. But the backspace key works perfectly normally in everything, including vim, after I log in.

So does this mean something about my keycodes getting loaded "normally" while something is failing to happen to yours? That's what it suggests to me.

I've always been puzzled by that message and yours is the first reference I've seen to it.

I had an issue like this on SUSE 9.1. Turned out to be a small difference in the type of keyboard mapping. My y's and z's were swapped along with backspace and del being different.

I've since wiped that system and gone with FC3, though I haven't had this problem with FC3, so I can't tell you what the keyboard change was.

Have you updated the kernel in FC3? I noticed a number of improvements since upping the kernel.

Possible Answer
 

When your having the backspace problem, is your num lock on? If its off turn it on and then try it. Thats my idea to fix the FC3 problem.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

To answer some of your questions:
Yes, I upgrade the kernel regularly and it hasn't fixed it yet, but here's hoping :)
No, it's a laptop, so I never use the numlock function.

To ask another:
Where does the kernel keep keymapping information? Like the kernel equivalent of xmod map, or does such a thing exist? From jonr's comment it sounds like there might be a customizeable keymap file floating around somwhere...

I found this line in /etc/termcap, perhaps it has something to do with it?

# fix the backspace key
screen.linux|screen in linux console:\
:bw:\
:kB@:kb=\177:tc=screen:


Also, dumpkeys --long-info |grep -i backspace gives me the following:

0x0008 BackSpace
0x0808 Meta_BackSpace
Control_h for BackSpace


Interestingly enough, cntrl+h performs the backspace function fine! So perhaps there is some way to map BackSpace back to cntrl+h?