Incidentally, I am not a member of this list, so please reply to or copy
to me in answering, thanks.
First, as to the mail problem: It obviously arises because I do not use
web-based mail and find it abhorrent. Right now, I am logged in via an ssh
session from my home computer to my office computer, which is a mail
server, and over there I am running sendmail and using pine to do my mail
business. However, the issue arose because
1. I prefer that mail from outside, especially from mailing lists, comes
through the main university mail system, thus, @auburn.edu. One reason for
this is that my office machine is otherwise a single point of failure in
my mail service. If it went down (which occasionally happens even to the
best of systems) then I would not get mail until it is fixed.
2. Mail is automatically forwarded (via smtp, not pop or imap) to
banach.math.auburn.edu (my own office machine) and that is where I
actually do all of my mail business.
3. I assumed that I need to register myself and would need a login and
password. Nothing came up but a series of amazing questions that have
nothing to do with my mail setup, at all and therefore in context were
complete nonsense. So I killed all of that and sent a plain text message.
Then I read again that I only have to send a "subscribe" message. Trusting
people, you are. In this age, that was totally unsuspected and thus was
another thing that threw me off stride.
The problem concerns permissions or transfer of key mappings in X.
Specifically, if I start up X with fvwm2 as my preferred window manager
and open an xterm as a user, then everything is fine. If I then at the
command line in the xterm type the command "su" and provide the root
password, then not everything works the same. The problem shows up in
particular if I run Midnight Commander in the xterm. In that case the Alt
key does something different.
As you probably know, there are a lot of shortcut keystrokes in Midnight
Commander. For example Alt-s will allow a downward directory search in a
panel in MC. And Alt-Enter will bring down a filename to the command line
which is below the two panels. Now, as I said, these key combinations work
perfectly well in the xterm if one is the user who started the X session.
But if one has done the su command to do some things as root inside of the
same window, then Alt-s for example prints a Hungarian-style accented o
(sorry, not reproducible here) on the command line instead of doing what
it is supposed to do. Also, it seems that the things which the Alt key
should be doing inside of MC get mapped over to the Cntrl key instead.
Thus, Alt-s -> Cntrl-s seems to work, and Alt-Enter -> Cntrl-Enter does
seem to work, too. This is an annoying transformation, of course, but
worse than that is, it also disables some of the key combinations which
work with the Alt key because those Cntrl-(same key) can mean something
entirely different and that meaning is the one which gets used instead.
More details, based upon further experiments:
The same problem occurs if one starts up an unadorned X with just the one
window in the upper left.
The same problem occurs if I start fvwm2 and then switch over to KDE (I do
not know if you have configured the shutdown menu to do that, but I have
done so locally, quite some time ago in addition to the default menu
choices which used to come with fvwm2).
The same problem does *not* occur if one starts KDE from the command line.
Namely, what happens then is I start KDE, open a window, and all is good.
Then I do su in the window, enter the root password, get a root shell, and
type mc. Then all is still good and the keys are performing as they
should.
My system? I am running Slackware-current which is at this moment equal to
Slackware 12.1, with a lot of locally installed software. The fvwm is
version 2.4.20, and the X stuff is something like 7.2.x IIRC.
Now, the above sequence indicates that what may be happening is a bug in
X. So I do not say that ipso facto this is a bug in fwwm2. That would
depend to some extent on what the X people think about this, I would
guess. They might believe that what they have done is not a bug but
a feature, for example. I have no way to know. Either way that would come
out, is this problem a previously known problem, or not?
Also it seems that somehow kde has avoided this glitch somehow even though
it is present at the lower level, somehow, in the X server and its
permissions, its keymaps, or whatever. And fvwm2 seems at this point not
to have avoided the problem, perhaps because nobody else tries to do
things the way that I do in my normal course of work and thus the problem
did not even come up for those individuals.
If you think this problem is cured in 2.4.25, I am glad to try it. But I
bet it is not. The problem is as I said one of those weird problems that I
bet nobody was thinking of. Unless the X people were thinking that they
were closing some kind of security hole, or something. So nobody over here
is particularly mad or upset. But it sure would be nice if the problem
could be tracked down.
Theodore Kilgore
