Input device problem

[Tony Houghton]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:01:07 +1000
Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 07:51:50PM +0000, Tony Houghton wrote:
> > I've got a DVB card (saa7146 chip) with a remote control which appears
> > as a Linux input device. The trouble is certain keys which correspond to
> > keys on an ordinary keyboard also appear on /dev/console when pressed,
> > which I don't want.
> 
> try upgrading to xserver 1.5.2.

This is happening even on the console though, not just in X.

I forgot to mention I'm using Debian (unstable), so unless it has
xserver 1.5.2 in "experimental" upgrading could take a lot of work. It's
currently based on 1.4.2. (2:1.4.2-9) with xorg in general being R7.3
(1:7.3+18).

> > I thought I could stop this being a problem in X by changing my
> > keyboard's "InputDevice" section to use the "evdev" driver with Option
> > "Device" "/dev/input/event0" instead of the "keyboard" driver. It seemed
> > to do the trick at first, but I soon discovered that with this setup
> > pressing the "4" key on my remote would abruptly terminate my X session,
> > as if I'd pressed Alt-Ctrl-Backspace, and there would be no explanation
> > in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Anywhere else I can look for clues?
> 
> please run evtest against the device and check what key is actually emitted
> when you press 4. That and the output of xkbcomp -xkb :0 - should give us a
> hint.

The trouble is X would probably crash or whatever it's doing before I
got to see the result of evtest, although I suppose I could run it
in a console or over ssh with DISPLAY set.

Anyway, the problem's gone away. I tried making some HAL rules to remove
the device's input.key* properties to see if that would stop
/dev/console responding to it. It didn't, but I thought I might as well
try X's evdev driver again and now I can safely press "4". If it isn't
broken any more I guess I should stop trying to fix it even if I'm not
sure what cured it. Thanks for your help anyway.

-- 
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk