Weird keyboard problem under 4.2.05

[Paolo Amoroso]

I use COHERENT on an OLIDATA 8100V laptop computer. It's
an Italian 20 MHz 80386DX clone with 2 Mb of RAM, a 120 Mb AT
bus hard disk drive (MS-DOS 5.0 partition: about 95 Mb; COHERENT
partition: about 25 Mb), a built in VGA card (Stingray Rev 4+, V
2.21 VGA BIOS by Cyrrus Logic) and a black an white LCD display
(16 levels of gray). The computer (Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS V. 1.10
22) has an internal 3.5" 1.44 Mb floppy disk drive (drive A:).
With version 4.0.1 the system, *including the keyboard*,
worked *wonderfully well*. During installation I had selected
the Italian keyboard driver. I had also modified, without
problem, the keyboard table to get some characters which are not
present on my keyboard (they are ` ~ { and }). Now I upgraded to
version 4.2.05 and the keyboard drive exhibits a weird behavior.
Pressing LeftSHIFT I get a ^F on the screen, while
RightSHIFT prints ^G. In other words, I can not issue a shell
command which includes a shifted character: I get the shifted
character, but I also get the extra control sequence. Besides
that, LeftAlt acts like ^D (i.e. it's equivalent to logout or
exit). RightAlt, on the other hand, acts like the RETURN key. I
tried running MicroEMACS and I got an equally strange behavior:
the Control key acts like Backspace, and SHIFT is like the
RETURN key. What a mess... :-(
I tried issuing the command `set -o emacs' at the shell
prompt. I use the Korn shell and my .login does not seem to
contain suspect commands. Well, the situation improved, but not
completely. I do get shifted characters regularly, but now the
LeftSHIFT and Control keys issue a beep through the computer's
speaker (just like a ^G) *every* time they are pressed! This is
especially annoying when I use the computer in the evening...
Besides all that, now the RightSHIFT acts like the RETURN key.
The above mentioned problems with MicroEMACS are still there.
This is, more or less, what happens to my system. If
this can be of any help, I add that COHERENT prints the
diagnostic string "8c" in the upper right angle of the screen
after booting, it claims to be using the "Italian virtual
console keyboard table - V1.6", I haven't installed virtual
consoles and no, my computer doesn't smoke the grass :) I am
particularly puzzled by the fact that COHERENT 4.0.1 worked
*fine* with my keyboard. What can be wrong? Any suggestions?
--
Paolo Amoroso - amo...@dsi.unimi.it (Univ.) - "Use the Source, Luke."

[Michael Gerhards]

In article <2j7f1g$p...@c700-2.sm.dsi.unimi.it> , Paolo Amoroso wrote:
[..]

> With version 4.0.1 the system, *including the keyboard*,
> worked *wonderfully well*. During installation I had selected
> the Italian keyboard driver. I had also modified, without
> problem, the keyboard table to get some characters which are not
> present on my keyboard (they are ` ~ { and }). Now I upgraded to
> version 4.2.05 and the keyboard drive exhibits a weird behavior.

I had huge problems with the keyboard-driver of 4.2 , too if I selected
_no_ virtual console. ( right-ctrl was return, etc. )

But after remaking a kernel with support of two virtual terminals and
the needed changes to /etc/ttys, the keyboard worked again.

Michael
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