Re: keyboard layouts (continued)

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, Maurice van der Pot wrote:

> Take a look at this: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=1080

Thanks, it's interesting reading, but about the old driver.  As far as I
understand it, this has been obsoleted by the new input driver.

> X gets its raw scan codes by setting a mode of the device. We shouldn't
> do that because it requires root privileges (and that's just one reason),

I strongly advocate using the proper kernel devices (ie drivers) and not
mess around with direct hardware access.  That might have been necessary
for X way back then, but nowadays the appropriate response to "it doesn't
work with my hardware" is IMHO "then get your vendor to release a driver
for Linux/BSD/whatever".  It also makes our job easier.  After all, Y is
supposed to be a layer that uses the kernel, not a partial kernel replacement.

The same goes, btw, for access to the graphics card.  We should, in the
case of Linux, rely on fb and maybe the drm module and not try to program
our own drivers.

> from key codes. I don't know if the linux kernel still just passes on
> the scan codes as key codes without conversion, like it used to.

You can still set it with kbd_mode, at least.  But it really uses the
input driver internally.  Last entry in the keyboard.c preamble:

 * 21-08-02: Converted to input API, major cleanup. (Vojtech Pavlik)

Regards,
Rupert