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Description of Problem: HW: Abit AT7 motherboard (no PS/2 connectors) and BTC 7932M USB keyboard with Norwegian layout. http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/pt_main_back.jsp?pPRODUCT_TYPE=MotherBoard&pMODEL_NAME=AT7 http://www.btc.com.tw/btc2001_e/products_general_hubless.html Problem 1: No Norwegian letters (ae, oslash and aring) in console (before startx). When keyboard "no" is selected, the keys with Norwegian letters results in {|}. When keyboard "no-latin1" is selecetd, nothing appears on screen when hitting the Norwegian keys. (If I backspace the "invisible" characters, I end up erasing my prompt). When the graphical interface is started (startx), the keys works as expected. Problem 2: '0' (zero) is displayed when the <Alt Gr> key is hit in console when NumLock is on (no graphical interface started). If I want to enter '@', which is entered as <Alt Gr>+<2>, the result is '0@'. If I want to enter '@@@@@', the result is '0@@@@@' (entered as <Alt Gr>+<2>+<2>+<2>+<2>+<2>). When the graphical interface is started, the <Alt Gr> key sometimes acts strange when hit for the first time. Usually a single '"' (double quote) is displayed, but sometimes a lot of 'b's are displayed (I have to stop it by hitting <Esc>). I have not hit the <b> key, and no keys are stuck. Afterwards, the <Alt Gr> key works as expected in the graphical interface. Problem 1 and 2 appears regardless of which shell I'm using (bash/tcsh). RH 8.0 is installed from scratch from the CD's (no upgrade).
This bug is not limited to USB keyboards. I tested a Compaq Professional Workstation AP550 with a Norwegian Compaq PS/2 keyboard and RH 8.0. The bugs appeared on this PC's console as well.
I can verify problem 2a), ie. Alt-Gr provides a 0 on key-press (not key-release) whenever Num Lock is active. This occurs for a whole range of tested keyboard maps (us, uk, dk, dk-latin1, no, no-latin, se-latin1, fi). I don't have any of the other problems which suggest more than one bug.
I've done some more testing. Same HW as in my original problem description. Since my USB-only HW works in RH 7.3, I tried an upgrade: I've installed RH 7.3 from scratch using the CDs: - Norwegian characters are ok in console and KDE. - <AltGr> works as expected in console and KDE. - No problems entering '@'. UPGRADED to RH 8.0 using the CDs: - In GRUB the keyboard worked. - When booting RH 8.0, kudzu started and expected a keyboard input. The keyboard did not work at all! Had to wait for kudzu to time out - The boot continued. - At login prompt: Neither keyboard nor mouse is working!
I have the same problem with a "be" keyboard layout on a Fujitsu non-USB keyboard on a Duron machine with an Eagletech MB(RH8 too). Worked fine with RH73, works fine with Win2000 on the same machine. I have seen a report of this bug somewhere on a newsgroup for RH73 though. It seems the alt-gr key sends a 0x30 scan code after the 0xE0 0x38 on key press. It is naturally translated to a "b". I don't know why it translates to a "0" on the console, but on X it translates to a double quote because the keyboard layout has this mapping for altgr+b. This is also strange in my opinion because be keyboards are not supposed to give special chars on altgr+alpha. If this was disabled it could be a good temporary workaround. I would like to stress that benign as it looks it is a very annoying (and even crippling) problem because the pipe, at sign, braces and brackets are generated that way on this keyboard.
non-ASCII input into the console won't be supported on UTF-8 based systems (RHL 8+) until the kernel supports it. See the release notes in the next beta for more info. Of course, input through X will always be supported.