[plug] XWindows and keyboards ...

[Trevor Phillips]

Ok, this is the old Backspace key problem. I became rather stumped when
one of my machines was working correctly, with no modification! It's the
same version of Debian & all, but it worked, and all my other installs
didn't.

After some rummaging, I noticed that running X gave the following error:

The XKEYBOARD keymap compiler (xkbcomp) reports:
> Error:            Cannot open "/var/X11R6/xkb/compiled/server-0.xkm" to write
keyboard description                                
>                   Exiting                      
Couldn't load XKB keymap, falling back to pre-XKB keymap

This dir (/var/X11R6/xkb/compiled) didn't exist on the system with the
keyboard problems. It had /var/X11R6, but not the rest. I created this
dir, and that solved the problem!

Now, to the machine that worked all along: IT didn't have this dir
either! In fact, it didn't have any /var/X11R6! I suspect it was writing
to /var/lib/xkb.

The question is, why are these two machines trying to write to different
dirs? Sure, they're slightly different hardware, but they were both
installed off the same Debian CD. Only diff was the working one I
installed a lot more packages (I think I picked one of the bigger
default installs, whereas now I usually go with the base then add what I
need).

Could someone please enlighten me as to what's going on here? Where is
it defined what directory the xkbcomp uses?? Any ideas??

(BTW: I haven't seen much traffic on this list. Ok, so I've been on it
less than 24 hours. ^_^;; If this sorta query is not for this list, let
me know...)

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: CWIS Technical Officer         -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                       -               Murdoch University | 
 >------------------- Member of the #SAS# & #CFC# --------------------<
| On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of     /
| course. But mostly evil, on the whole.                             /
 \      -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)                          /