Keymap problem maybe?

[Frank Carmickle]

Cheryl!

Oh boy!  Now you've really got me stumped.  I thought we were talking
about the same tree.  OK!  I am completely unsure of what the console-tools
packages is trying to do or is doing.  You may have a speakupmap loading
which could cause this behavior with the alt key.  To be honest I don't
think your going to figure this out with out a little trial and
error.  What you need to do is find a regular usmap and invoke it with
loadkeys.  Finding a regular usmap may prove to be an interesting task on
your system.  Tommy currently has the standard usmap being the
speakupmap.  I hope that in future releases we can have a separate
speakupmap.  That would make this a bunch less confusing.  You need to be
really careful with this keymap stuff or you could really hose your
machine pretty good.  So I say start by backing up the keymap that's being
loaded.  Unfortunately this isn't the easiest thing in the world to figure
out.  If you have a look at /etc/init.d/keymap.sh you may be able to get
an idea for what is happening.  Unfortunately I don't have a system here
that is loading a keymap.  /etc/init.d/keymap.sh in my case actually does
a dumpkeys from the kernel for some odd reason.  Oh but yes this might
actually be a good thing to try!  When you have the nonspeakup kernel
running do a 'dumpkeys >nonspeakupmap.map'.  Probably just keeping this
file in roots homedir /root isn't a bad place for it.  Then do a 'loadkeys
<nonspeakupmap.map'.  If you don't get a working alt key at that point
then I would be extremely surprised!  

Now how to fix this long term I am unsure at this point.  Let's just see
if this works to start with.

HTH

-- 
     Frank Carmickle
phone:     412 761-9568
email:     frankiec at dryrose.com