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Re: Making the keyboard work



On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 13:44 -0500, der Mouse wrote:
> > Having an easy to use editor in base would be nice, but wouldn't
> > having a fully working keyboard be better?
> 
> Oddly enough, a fully working keyboard is just what I already have, and
> have had since at least my 1.4T freeze point.  But perhaps we disagree
> over what constitutes "fully working".

I would say fully working constitutes the keys I've been using for over
a decade to work.

> > Infact, editing files isn't that great when your home/end keys don't
> > work.
> 
> How about, when they don't exist?  Mine doesn't have any, and it
> doesn't seem to have caused me any problems editing files.  Maybe I
> just don't use editors simple enough to have problems with this.
>
> (The world is more than peecee-layout keyboards.)

So yours don't exist. Mine do and have for some time.
I also have a Sun keyboard for my Sparc64 with home/end keys, which
isn't peecee.

> > What's more, I find it embarassing that in this day and age it
> > doesn't work.  Can you really take an OS seriously when something as
> > basic as the keyboard doesn't work as it should?
> 
> There are so many unstated assumptions here this is unanswerable.
> 
> First is that the OS _has_ a "the keyboard".  Serial consoles, anyone?
> 
> Second is that your idea of how it should work is the only correct one.
> 
> Third is that everyone shares your prioritzation of keyboards working
> the way you want above other things (like, oh, I dunno, schedulers, VM,
> disk drivers) in judging an OS's seriousness.
> 
> Personally, I find keyboard support working the way you want - or even
> the way *I* want - far, far lower on my priority list when it comes to
> taking an OS seriously than, say, device drivers, network stack, and
> the VM subsystem.
> 
> But maybe that's just me.
> 
> That said, if you want to hack on the keyboard support for whatever
> port you care about, have at it.  But you might want to pick a more
> correct list than tech-userlevel; as far as I can tell very little of
> keyboard handling is in userland, unless you're running X (in which
> case it seems to me an X list would be more appropriate).

The keyboard support is already there, no hacking as such is needed.
What we are discussing is enabling it by default.

Thanks

Roy

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