Hi all, I'm digging around at a quirk involving Scroll Lock and KVM switching that I think X is responsible for and hoping someone here can explain it. At this point I can work around it myself. But I'd really like to understand it, or perhaps provoke a change to make it work better for others less inclined to dig at this than I am.
Like many other KVM's out there, mine triggers switches through double Scroll Lock taps. This has often required some fiddling to get working properly in the past, usually by adding Scroll_Lock to mod3 using xmodmap. But sometime recently, (I think) something changed in X11's key handling. A while back, my GNOME desktop stopped switching on Scroll Lock (even with the xmodmap) but still switched on Num Lock. Then it stopped working entirely in GNOME, XFCE, or Openbox. What I found after poking around some more tonight is that I can get the KVM trigger working by twiddling the LED's with xset... xset led 3 && sleep 0.2 && xset -led 3 That toggles the LED's and triggers the KVM. In some sense, this solves my problem. I can put that in a script and bind it to a key. But I'd like to actually understand what's going on. Also, since Scroll Lock is the most common KVM trigger, it would be nice to fix this so that it "just works" for people with less enthusiasm for this sort of detective work. It seems like this shouldn't be an earth-shaking architectural change, but I admit I don't know jack about the internals of X. Specifically, here's what I see on Debian Sid... 1) In the console, Scroll Lock and KVM switching work properly with no tweaks. 2) In an untweaked X session, the Num Lock LED works while the Scroll Lock one does not. Both keys register in xev output. 3) After "xmodmap -e 'add mod3 = Scroll_Lock'", the Scroll Lock LED works. But it still doesn't trigger the KVM. 4) Even without the xmodmap line, twiddling the LED's via xset both toggles the LED's and triggers the KVM. What I'd really like to understand is what's different internally between toggling the LED via xset and doing it through an xmodmap'd Scroll Lock. Clearly the KVM is seeing those events differently and I don't know enough about X to understand why. If it's not too much of an undertaking, I'd also suggest that Scroll Lock should work as expected, or at least have an easy xorg.conf option to make it work as expected. A little Googling will show a decade's worth of posts across the web from KVM users trying to get their boxes to switch properly. And since the old xmodmap solution doesn't work anymore, it would be helpful to have a solution that doesn't involve hacky scripts and keybinding. Cheers! Todd _______________________________________________ xorg@lists.x.org: X.Org support Archives: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg Info: http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg Your subscription address: arch...@mail-archive.com
