x11 keyboard mapping screwed up

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Level 2

308 points

x11 keyboard mapping screwed up

Suddenly the keyboard layout in x11 is completely wrong. All keys give wrong characters (w gives =, delete gives ",", t gives w etc.), but otherwise x11 seems to work. It happens in xterm and in inkscape. It might be that this has happened after the 10.5.7 update, I don't use x11 often. What can I do to fix this problem?

MacBook Air 1.6/HDD, Mac OS X (10.5.6), MacBook (10.4.11) iPhone 2G Dell Windows Vista

Posted on Jun 10, 2009 9:17 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

nerowolfe

Level 6

13,090 points

Jun 10, 2009 9:29 AM in response to ahostmadsen

Check the X11 keyboard preferences.
Be sure you are running at least version 2.0
You might also drag these files to the desktop and log out and back it and see if that helps.

org.x.X11.plist
com.apple.x11.plist

They are in the
~/library/preferences
directory.

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Answer 2

ahostmadsen Author

Level 2

308 points

Jun 10, 2009 9:32 AM in response to ahostmadsen

Well, I found the solution on the xquartz site. If anybody else has this problem: remove the folder /usr/X11/share/X11/xkb.

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Answer 3

nerowolfe

Level 6

13,090 points

Jun 10, 2009 11:14 AM in response to ahostmadsen

ahostmadsen wrote:
Well, I found the solution on the xquartz site. If anybody else has this problem: remove the folder /usr/X11/share/X11/xkb.

You must have had some special files in there.
The only thing I found in that complete directory chain:
/usr/X11/share/X11/xkb/
is one additional directory
compiled
which contains only an innocuous textfile,
README.compiled.

The question is what was in your directory.

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

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Answer 4

ahostmadsen Author

Level 2

308 points

Jun 10, 2009 10:37 PM in response to nerowolfe

My directory had lots of files and subdirectories, here

compat geometry.dir keymap.dir symbols types.dir
compat.dir keycodes rules symbols.dir xkbcomp
compiled keycodes.dir semantics torture
geometry keymap semantics.dir types

So, maybe that's the problem. For some reason, this directory gets populated on some computers. Then it causes problems.

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