Continuation of the previous one.
The “M$ occassionally we make usefulstuff” keyboard is working fine after foolishly attempt looking at xev output and modifying /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/evdev to map what I thought was the correct codes. The wrong codes were due to my mixing the kbd driver and evdev driver (for extended events aka fancy buttons). You get both if you comment the kbd driver out (in xorg.conf) and add two evdev keyboards (for me the event devices are event5 and event6). X not getting the device from HAL automagically has something to do with the GDM kinda session creation. I login to console and ‘startx’ – more digging later.
The Caps to Control map that did not work in console (mentioned in earlier post) was due to change in approach to doing it – Now you set X-like option (XKBOPTIONS=”ctrl:nocaps”) in /etc/default/console-setup.
I stumbled on another bug – apparently related to evdev driver or xorg – the left arrown, down arrow and the ‘end’ key lose their ‘repeat’ capability – Using the work around mentioned here.
Compiz was crashing with :
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::logic_error'
what(): basic_string: :_S_construct NULL not valid
Googling indicated someone had gotten past the error by setting the LANG variable – tried it and it worked (LANG=en_US.utf-8 for me.)
Still broken:
Mplayer playback acts funny – every 30 seconds to one minute it apparently realizes it was slow and does a quick ‘catching’ up. No clue on this one yet – VLC also acted in similar manner a couple of times.
My “TyTN II – OpenSync – synce” setup is blown mostly by the python upgrade. This is going to take quite some time to get back.