My troubles with Xorg Modular (Gentoo)

Feb 10, 01:05 AM

This will be my first full-on geek posting. I’m a Gentoo Linux user, unstable (~x86), and I decided I wanted to go Xorg 7.0 (Modular). I followed a combination of the directions at gentoo-wiki and the ones in the Gentoo documentation. Somewhere along the line I did something wrong (still haven’t figured out what) and when I started X pressing any key changed the resolution, the only thing that gave input was my numpad. A few google searches and a day later, I found my solution.

The errors I was getting were as such:
expected keysym, got XF86_Switch_VT_1: line 8 of xfree86 expected keysym, got XF86_Switch_VT_2: line 11 of xfree86 […] > Warning: Multiple interpretations of “NoSymbol+AnyOfOrNone(all)” > Using last definition for duplicate fields
This is just a sample. The errors repeating a few times with a few alterations. After trying various different xorg.conf set ups, and googling for answers online, I finally found my solution. First, I added the following to my xorg.conf:
Section “ServerFlags” Option “Dont Zoom” EndSection
This removes the zooming effect (which is basically a resolution change) that I was getting whenever I pressed a key. Then, after more googleing, I found that I was missing /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB, which was causing X to be unable to determine the layout of my keyboard. A simple locate (or find, if you prefer) pointed me to /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB which I then copied to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB:
einsiedler X11 # cp /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/
And things started cleaning up. After a bit more hacking of my xorg.conf I ended up with:
Section “InputDevice” Identifier “Keyboard” Driver “kbd”
  1. Option “CoreKeyboard”
  2. Option “XkbRules” “xorg”
  3. Option “XkbModel” “pc104”
  4. Option “XkbLayout” “us”
    EndSection

You can see that there’s 4 option lines in there that are commented out. For one reason or another leaving these in (in various combinations) caused a variety of problems. However, I may try commenting out XkbLayout by itself, I believe that may work fine.

At this point I’m still having a few minor issues. Turning off numlock automatically lights up the scroll lock indicator on my keyboard, despite the fact that scroll lock isn’t turned on. In fact, I don’t think scroll lock is functioning at all – not that I ever use it. Uncommenting XkbLayout may fix this, but I don’t know if I want to mess with it anymore since it’s functioning 99.9% at this time.

Anywho, that was my experience with xorg modular, so hopefully that will work from here on out.

— Mark Harrison

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Comments

  1. Beautiful! I really like this style, man.

    And I can\'t wait to suffer from Xorg 7 on Cooker :)

    — Adriano Varoli · 06.02.10, 05:35 AM · #

  2. glad you like the new style :) i spent a whole night redoing it.

    is mandriva going xorg 7? i thought they\'d stick with 6.9, the non-modular release, for the time being.

    — tyme · 06.02.11, 02:31 PM · #

  3. Well, they\'re discussing about it in the cooker ML. It will indeed take some time.

    — Adriano Varoli · 06.02.11, 05:12 PM · #

  4. Hi, out of interest, I\'ve just run into exactly the same bizarre behaviour. I didn\'t suffer the constantly trying to change the resolution problem, but unless one of the numlock or capslock leds are lit, the scroll-lock led lights up. This happens pressing immediately after X starts, from pressing just about any key. Scroll lock on it\'s own will turn it off again, but it\'ll come right back. It\'s just a minor nuisance but since you wrote about this a while ago I thought you might have found a solution.

    Here\'s my setup: brand spanking new gentoo, complete with modular-x courtesy of xorg-x11-7. No /usr/X11R6 symlink (I took it out), and despite symlinking /usr/share/X11/xkb to /usr/lib/X11/xkb, and /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB to /usr/lib/X11, and linking /usr/bin/xkbcomp to /usr/lib/X11/xkbcomp, I still suffer this problem. Doing all this symlinking has cured the error messages when altering the keyboard options under gnome, but the scrolllock\'s still going haywire. The only other indication that anything\'s wrong is that the keyboard shortcuts capplet doesn\'t accept the windows keys as modifiers, it marks it as super_l (rather than Mod4).

    What\'s most frustrating is that all my other boxes which were upgraded from monolithic to modular X on gentoo are all going smoothly. I just can\'t figure out what\'s different between them.

    So, if you\'ve got any ideas, suggestions, things to try, areas to look into, bug reports to read, crazy rituals to perform please let me know and I\'ll give them a go. I\'d really love to get this thing fixed. Thanks very much!

    — Mike · 06.03.09, 07:27 PM · #

  5. I never got the issue fixed myself. Shortly after I posted about this I bought a nice new keyboard which actually doesn\'t have numlock or scroll lock, so I\'m unable to give you any further advice on it. I sort of just dealt with it until I got the new keyboard :)

    — tyme · 06.03.09, 08:38 PM · #

  6. Ok, cool, well, thanks for getting back to me. If I find a fix for it, I\'ll try and post back here in case anyone\'s interested. Thanks again...

    — Mike · 06.03.10, 07:21 AM · #

  7. I got the scroll lock led problem also. Problem on gentoo was that i had x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-0.7-r1 merged.

    I took these steps to fix the problem:
    emerge -C x11-misc/xkeyboard-config
    Remove directory /usr/lib/X11/xkb
    Remove directory /usr/share/X11/xkb
    emerge -va x11-misc/xkbdata-1.0.1

    Maybe you have to unmask/place in keywords to merge xkbdata

    — Mark · 06.03.13, 08:02 AM · #

  8. I\'m running ~x86, and xkbdata-1.0.1 is unmasked for me. I imagine if you\'re running stable it needs to be unmasked manually.

    — tyme · 06.03.13, 08:17 AM · #

  9. After emerging modular xorg my Scroll Lock key has stopped working. Following Mark\'s tip (emerge -C x11-misc/xkeyboard-config, Remove directory /usr/share/X11/xkb, emerge -va x11-misc/xkbdata-1.0.1) has solved the problem for me. Thank you.

    — Fernando Rosa · 06.10.01, 10:20 PM · #

  10. Nice posting. You saved me. I installed MythTV and in the process it setup the MythTV Front End and wiped out the link or file which caused my keyboard to fail, as well as messed up my display manager.

    — Doctor Who · 07.07.02, 12:42 PM · #

 
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