I'm really unhappy with the keyboard of the E5400. For a fast typer it is a nightmare. Many characters are dropped, and the feeling is just not right, especially when compared to my old Latitude D820.
I also have a problem, which seems to be unrelated to the hardware because it existed already on my D820 with an almost identical setup. From time to time CAPS lock is turned on, although the CAPS lock LED is not lit (and vice versa). After some typing, the effect usually vanishes but it is very annoying.
A similar effect, that I also know from my D820 already is that X somehow occasionally thinks that I have the control key permantly pressed. Typing "D" in a terminal window closes it (think "CTRL-D"), "C" terminates process, and moving the mouse will permanently select text, so that I can no longer type anything (because I would overwrite my selection). This can usually be cured only by a reboot, restarting X is not enough.
My keyboard has German layout (qwertz). The relevant section for
it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf looks like this:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "Protocol" "Standard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbLayout" "de"
Option "XkbModel" "latitude"
# Option "XkbVariant" ",deadgraveacute"
# Option "XdbOption" "grp:toggle,grp_led:scroll"
EndSection
For Gentoo you should normally use xorg rules. You can find a
list of support keyboard layouts in
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst in the
section "! layout", and for the model in "! model". Variants
of the keyboad layout can be found in the section "! variant"
(those for the "de" keyboard layout are marked with "de:"). You
can find a better explanation for the specific layout in
/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/
(replace XYXY with your selected layout).
Options are explained in
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst in the
"! options" section.
There was a problem with KDE resp. Qt applications. KDE/Qt seems to have an unglory tradition of problems with dead keys (see for example http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=1908). In my case the dead keys in the Greek keyboard layout did not work, whereas dead keys for German keyboard layout did work (for example for "é" or other accented characters). This applied only to Qt applications.
It turned out to be a problem of the locale settings. I
did not set any locale, so that all my apps somehow thought
that "ANSIX3.4-1968" (which is simly the canonical name
for "ASCII") was my preferred locale. Setting the environment
variables LANG and LC_ALL
to "en_US.UTF-8" (or any other utf-8 locale, try
locale -a for a list of options) fixed
the problem.
You can also use any Greek 8-bit locale, for example "el_GR.iso88597". It seems that Qt refuses to compose characters with diacritic marks that are not included in the current locale. No matter what the Qt guys say, it's a bug ...
You also have to set the console keymap to the desired keymap
if the default "us" (standard US keyboard layout) does not fit
for you. You can find a tree of valid keyboard mappings in
/usr/share/keymaps/i386.
I still have issues with the console settings. When typing non-ASCII characters into a console (or terminal emulator, local and remote), for each non-ASCII character deleted with backspace, there is a discrepancy of one byte:
# aböö
Now I hit backspace one and hit return:
# abö -bash: abö?: command not found
It looks like backspace deletes bytewise in the console input buffer but character-wise in the display. Any help on this issue would be appreciated.
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