keyboard arrow keys not working...

[Peter Hutterer]

On Sun, Oct 27, 2024 at 08:33:22PM -0400, William Bulley wrote:
> According to Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> on Sun, 10/27/24 at 20:06:
> > 
> > paging in things from a long time ago: arrow keys mixup used to be
> > an indication of xfree86 vs evdev XKB rules. I don't know enough about
> > FreeBSD but might be that you're using the evdev ruleset with the
> > old keyboard driver or the xfree86 ruleset with the evdev/libinput
> > driver. You might find google results for this from around 2006-2009
> > where this was a frequent-enough bug.
> 
> Thank you for the reply!  I'll forgive you for not knowing enough
> about FreeBSD.  *grin*
> 
> I have been struggling looking up things along the lines of which
> you speak above.  Not knowing the history is somewhat of a road
> block, but I think you are onto something.
> 
> I have a friend with similar setup who ran the same setxkbmap(1)
> that I attached to my email.  Instead of "base" for "rules" he
> had "evdev" and his setup works fine (keyboard plus xorg/x11).
> 
> I have "libinput" in my "InputClass" sections of my xorg config
> file in the /usr/local/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory.
> 
> It is unfortunate that this stuff is still in the mix and able
> to let dummys like me stumble into a confusing situation.  :-(

make sure you don't have Option XkbRules set anywhere, it should default
to "evdev" (unless FreeBSD builds with some other option).

Otherwise try this:

cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-override-xkb-rules <<EOF
Section "InputClass"
  Identifier "force evdev rules"
  MatchIsKeyboard "on"
  Option "XkbRules" "evdev"
EndSection
EOF

That should do the trick, the xorg.conf man page explains what the above
does.

Cheers,
  Peter