I had this problem some time ago and finally did some I-forget-what kind of magic to deal with it. This time it is really weird, because the problem does not affect all users. What was the "cause" of the problem is that I ran out of disk space, upgraded to a much larger hard drive, and while I was at it I upgraded the operating system from Slackware-12.0 to Slackware-current, which appears to me to be in the last stages before the next release. I did the upgrade in part because there were a rather huge number of security patches to apply, in any event.
Here is the problem: 1. Start up X (fvwm2, no fancy desktop) as a user. then 2. Open an xterm and start MC. No problems. Everything nice. 3. In an xterm, do "su" and give the password to do a root session in that window. Then, in the root window only, the Alt key followed by a keystroke (Alt-s for search the directory, for example) will print a funny character at the command line and otherwise will not do what it is supposed to do. As I said, this does not happen if one is a user. Moreover, the Cntrl key has taken over the abilities of the Alt key in addition to its own. For example, Cntrl-s will permit the downward search of the directory, and Cntrl-Enter will bring something down to the command line now, instead of Alt-Enter, which does not work. Again, all of these things continue to work as they should if one is a user, in the same X session. The contents of the .mc directory are identical for both user and root. I am sure this would be the first question so I answered it here. Also (anticipating second question), does this happen in the regular terminal and not in X? No. As I said, this problem happened to me once before. But last time it was for both user and root. Here, it is root only and not user, who has the problem. Thus, it would seem to be a permissions problem, but where, and how to cure it? If it is a permissions problem, of course, the problem could be somewhere in the X setup. In that case it would not be a ball lying in the MC court, obviously. But has anyone else encountered this kind of thing? Are there any reasonable measures which MC setup could use, in order to avoid this happening? Theodore Kilgore _______________________________________________ Mc mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
