Re: Using Cygwin to connect an AIX box. Questions for german, italian, french, spanish [...] users

[Stephane Poirey <moins20 at ifrance dot com>]

Finnaly I've found a very nice workaround : instead of using some dtterm, I
work with some "aixterm -v" or "xterm -t" (the last works better).

I don't have much time to learn exactly why those terminals are smart
enough to understand my AltGr key but they does, so it's enough for me for
the moment.

Best regards.

At 09:48 06/08/02 +0200, you wrote:
>
>Harold,
>My NumLock key is always off, and if I try to put it on before connecting to 
>the remote host then it's like if my Alt_Gr key was locked down (but it's in 
>the FAQ :-).
>
>If I put it on AFTER login in there is no change.
>
>So in my case playing with NumLock has no good effect.
>
>Below is an extract of the AIX keyboard definition file. I'm not used to
read 
>those files but it sounds surprising to me as I believed that Mode_switch
was 
>known as "Mod3" and according to those lines it seems to be "Mod2" on AIX,
is 
>it possible ?
>
>(from /usr/lpp/X11/defaults/xmodmap/Fr_FR/keyboard)
>! Modifiers
>! ---------
>clear Lock
>clear Mod1
>clear Mod2
>add Lock = Shift_Lock
>add Mod1 = Alt_L
>add Mod2 = Mode_switch
>
>
>En réponse à Harold L Hunt II <huntharo@msu.edu>:
>
>> Stephane,
>> 
>> Have you tried turning 'NumLock' off when you use XDMCP to connect to 
>> your AIX machine?
>> 
>> NumLock used to be ``server handled'' which means that the X Server sees
>> 
>> that NumLock is pushed and it sends the number keys for the numeric 
>> keypad; when it sees that NumLock is not pushed, the server sends 
>> clients the arrow keys, home, end, pg up, pg down, etc.
>> 
>> NumLock was added as a ``modifier key'' within the last few years.  This
>> 
>> means that X Clients must check whether NumLock is pushed to determine
>> 
>> how to interpret each key.
>> 
>> The problem here is broken X Server/Xlib/X Clients that check for AltGr
>> 
>> via some sort of check such as:
>> 	if (CapsLock)
>> 	{ /* do something */ }
>> 	else if (ScrollLock)
>> 	{ /* do something */ }
>> 	else
>> 	{ /* assume AltGr is pushed */ }
>> 
>> These broken implementations were written to assume that any modifier 
>> value equal to or above the highest-known modifier value used at the 
>> time was the modifier corresponding to the highest-known modifier value
>> 
>> at that time.  In other words, if AltGr was modifier 4 then the broken
>> 
>> implementation would treat any modifiers >= 4 as AltGr.  NumLock is 
>> essentially modifer 5 in this case (that's probably not the actual 
>> value), so 5 >= 4 causes the broken programs to interpret NumLock 
>> incorrectly.
>> 
>> The strange thing about all of this is that we copied the XFree86-linux
>> 
>> code for keyboard support.  That code treats NumLock as a modifier.  The
>> 
>> code that we lifted must only be used for certain keyboards or on 
>> certain platforms because most XFree86-linux users report that the 
>> problem does not affect them, while AIX, et al are affected.
>> 
>> The main drawback to modifying the numeric keypad key codes when we see
>> 
>> that NumLock is on is that we cannot seem to catch all cases and handle
>> 
>> them properly.  That is, we used to translate numeric keypad codes 
>> before and we never got it quite right.   People were always complaining
>> 
>> that some key did not work as it was supposed to.  These complaints went
>> 
>> away after we made NumLock a modifier.
>> 
>> So, try turning NumLock off and let us all rejoice if you have
>> success.
>> 
>> Harold
>
>