Am I the last xkbset user on the planet?!
Sam Hart
2008-04-12 05:22:30I've been an xkbset user for a long while now (I'd estimate at least since 2001). I'm someone who can't stand two things when working with laptops:
- 1) I hate it when they don't have a 3rd mouse button (for all my handy-dandy copy/paste goodness under X)
- 2) I hate it when they have all these damned unused keys all over the keyboard (Windows key, Internet Explorer key, email key, "arrow clicky on an abstract pull-down menu key")
Well, the wunnerful thing about Linux and X is that I could remap those useless keys to more useful functions. Couple this fact with the powerful fbkeys in Fluxbox, and I can set up some pretty useful combinations.
For example, in every laptop I've had thus far there's been a useless Windows key down on the left of the keyboard between the CTRL and the ALT. This is as good a place as any for a middle mouse button, so I've always remapped it with some variation of the following:
xkbset m
xkbset exp =m
xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = Pointer_Button2 Pointer_Drag2"
(Obviously, keycode 115 has to be changed when that number isn't valid)
Anyway, everything's been hunky-dory for a while now and I've been a content and happy beaver... At least, until sometime this last week....
See, I've upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu Hardy because a) it's supposedly close to release and b) I needed the version of rdiff-backup from it (as well as some other things). The Hardy experience has been... ahem... less than stellar (I'm honestly quite worried about this release, Hardy is, what, 2 weeks away from release? .. and I am constantly finding new and exciting bugs that, if it were me, I'd consider show-stoppers).
Well, at some point in the last two weeks, xkbset stopped working. I have no idea which update it was, or what the package was that did it, because I was stupidly hibernating my laptop for a week and a half (and yet letting the updates occur).
All that I know is I rebooted on Wednesday of this week and suddenly I get the following error when xkbset is ran:
XKB not supported for display :0.0
I've filed a bug on it, but I'm betting it wont be looked at. Looking at the upstream Debian changelog for xkbset we see that the last update happened in Jan. 2006 and it was a non-maintainer upload (meaning the actual maintainer is MIA). This then goes from bad to worse when we look upstream at the xkbset source and see no new releases since Nov. 2002!
So it seems that xkbset is in a dire state of complete and utter un-maintenance (yay! creative word creation!) and I have to wonder, am I so much of a dinosaur that I missed the meeting where everyone else decided they didn't need AccessX and MouseKeys anymore? Am I the last person on the damned planet who uses this functionality?