Lets go back to square 1.
The keyboard is the most fundamental device ever, it was invented about
80 years before anyone figured out how to connect it to a computer,
before the computer even existed actually....
The fundamental AT 101 keyboard, or microsoft's gay variant the PC-104,
and the increasingly faggoty variants that have come since is still
basically one almost absolutely interchangable device. You would have to
go to a time before roughly 1986 to find a keyboard without modern edit
keys. (search PC XT 83-key ).
Ok. So I am in a situation where an absolutely fundamental technology
that's dead simple ( classically an 8042 microcontroller talking to
another 8042 microcontroller over a really simple serial link...)
Since, presumably, EVERYONE uses this device, and EVERYONE would be
screwed if any part of it stopped working for any reason, and it,
theoretically, should be impossible to break because nobody would ever
have any reason to touch the code that should have been basically
calcified for the last fifteen years, and if they did touch it, *AND*
test it, then they would instantly notice problems and such a change
would never be committed to github much less make it out to the
repository and onto my system.
Now I'm in a situation where something that couldn't possibly break, has
been broken so utterly that I have no idea where even to begin. I looked
at the manpage for setxkbmap and it's the normal moonspeak, talking
about things that are utterly orthogonal to the problem I'm facing, and
offering dozens of command line switches, all of them seem to have a
40-60% chance of being even slightly relevant. Google pulls up results
from ten years ago.
The keyboard is known working, the console driver works great... So why
two drivers???????
I know about 42% of the answer to that.... There are two worlds,
TEXTBOOKLAND and the real world that we actually live in.
In textbookland, there are two types of devices: block devices and
character devices. Nothing else exists, and unix is complete and perfect
with just block devices and character devices. The linux console lives
mostly in textbookland.
X11, however, has to work in the real world where it had to superimpose
a whole new framework of event-driven devices like keyboards, mices,
gamepads, etc... that operate in real time and support games and human
interractions. I have not yet found /come across any textbook that
acknowledges the existence of such devices. The kernel must provide some
minimal, begrudging facility to allow them to exist but the workings of
the entire stack is shrouded in mystery and obfuscation up to the
user-level libraries such as SDL-input and such...
Linux, ofcourse, provides ten thousand different things to waste time
becoming an expert on. It never entered even my most fevered immaginings
that I would have to become an expert on the keyboard input system after
figuring out how to toggle the layout over to dvorak...
--
You can't out-crazy a Democrat.
#EggCrisis #BlackWinter
White is the new Kulak.
Powers are not rights.
