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keyboard on a macbook 2

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weedlight
weedlight Posts: 54
in I/O Devices

Hi, I installed debian stable with a custom realtime kernel (2.6.31.6) on a macbook 2, today. After installation I recognized that the keyboard didn't work correctly. But as I found the following site http://wiki.debian.org/MacBook the salvation seemed to be closer to me. I got the right mac key to work as third level chooser but still can't switch to an other console. At Xorg I didn't have a look at it, yet. Because as I tried some inappropriate layouts I had to use the rescue system!

So finally I need help with the keyboard setup on a macbook 2 for console and Xorg.

What I did till now:

add the line below to '/etc/console-tools/remap'

s/keycode 126 =/keycode 126 = AltGr/;

run `loadkeys` command

run `dpkg-reconfigure -p low console-data` and selected the "pc / qwertz / Swiss / German / Apple USB" keyboard layout even it's a built in keyboard

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  • weedlight
    weedlight Posts: 54
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    Finally I got it. I've never installed Linux on a macbook before, so I didn't know that the function switch key <Fn> must be used in combination with <Ctrl>, <Alt> and function keys.
  • Jinux
    Jinux Posts: 20
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    I'm glad you got it working but it's very frustrating to have a thread end like that with no information. For the benefit of any one else who may be having the same issue, could you tell us how you managed to get it going? A small step-by-step list would be great or at the very least a bit of knowledge to point us in the right direction.

    :side:
  • weedlight
    weedlight Posts: 54
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    I just run the commands and configuration which I wrote in the first post then I was able to use the right apple key as third level chooser. After searching with google for a while I figured out that switching occurs as described in the second post. But in Xorg I still can't access third level symbols. I inserted the following line in the keyboard section:

    XKBOPTIONS="lv3:rwin_switch"


    Now it's running debian unstable!
  • mfillpot
    mfillpot Posts: 2,177
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    Congratulations on your success. I am sorry that I did not respond, but your issue was foreign to my skill set and I would not have had anything to offer.

    With that being said, thank you very much for sharing your issue and resolution here, you have through a few words given guidance to others that will encounter this issue in the future.
  • weedlight
    weedlight Posts: 54
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    Now I got it on Xorg, too. Run the following commands:

    `xev`
    `xmodmap -e "keycode 134 = ISO_Level3_Shift"`

    The first command is for retrieving keycodes and the second assigns it to 3 level switch.
  • weedlight
    weedlight Posts: 54
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    Root had no support for special characters see the output of `locale` for information about current localization. Undo all changes for xorg and `dpkg-reconfigure locales` and choosing the appropriate locale, in my case de_CH.UTF-8 fixed the problem, too! Due negative experiences with choosing anything else than "C - No Localization" in debian installation process, I selected C as default localization during installation. The problem was most programs just support ASCII so you had to be careful with ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 and writing configuration files. Once I believed my system was broken as a novice. I'm not sure if this can also happen with UTF-8 because it should have an approximate backward compatibility with ASCII.

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