On 18 Jan 2010, at 21:50, James Ausmus wrote:
Very recent buyers of Lenovo laptops don't even *have* a SysRq key
anymore. I
reckon it won't be long before other makers follow suit. I can see
Lenovo's
point: there's probably less than 10,000 people in the whole world
that ever
used that key in the last 12 months and all of them are very au
fait with
Linux
Yuck - really? Not even as an unlabeled Alt function of a Print
Screen button?
Sounds like a new kernel patch needs to be introduced, which allows
you to select an alternative to the SysRq key for the magic
commands... <sigh> Stupid HW manufacturers...
To me, this sounds like rationalisation - in the "make more efficient
by reorganizing it in such a way as to dispense with unnecessary
personnel or equipment" sense - on behalf of hardware manufacturers.
I would hate to do away with the numeric keypad myself, but at the
same time I have to question how often I use it. When I look at the
whole keyboard it seems crazy to have 102 or 105 keys in order to type
26 letters, 10 numbers and some punctuation.
The function keys of regular keyboards are never used by the majority
of people, and it has been this way for over a decade. Yet new
keyboards require them because IBM keyboards had them in the 1980s.
The authors of window managers map the "close window" shortcut to alt-
F4 because the F4 key is there and is sure to be unused by anything
else, but this function could easily be moved elsewhere if we got rid
of the extra keyboard clutter.
Stroller.
