Making AltGr work on powerpc notebooks

[Martin Pitt]

Hi fellows!

It is time to discuss bug

  https://bugzilla.ubuntulinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2327
 
The problem: there are some powerpc notebooks around (at least
European iBooks) which do not have an "AltGr" key. But without AltGr
it is impossible to type characters like @ {} [] ~ \ on non-English
keyboard layouts.

The solution to this is to use the Apple (Command) key as AltGr. [1]
describes how to do that under Gnome; in short, you need the
'lv3:lwin_switch' keyboard option in your X configuration. This will
make the Apple key ("Left Windows" - hmmm) act as a level-3 keyboard
switch, i. e. the function that AltGr is supposed to have.

However, hardcoding this as the default would have the drawback that
the Apple key could not be used for other purposes any more on powerpc
books that _do_ have an AltGr key.

So what are the options?

1. Leave it as it is and annoy European iBook users (at least they
   cannot complain by email since they are unable to type '@' :-) )

2. Make lv3:lwin_switch default and annoy PowerBook and
   British/American iBook users

3. Have the powerpc version of the X server ask a debconf question and
   annoy all powerpc users

4. Autodetect whether an AltGr key is present (but I do not have the
   slightest idea how to do that). An ad-hoc heuristics would be to
   enable lv3:lwin_switch on non-English locales on powerpc, but I
   know too little about other non-English iBook keyboard layouts.

Thanks in advance for any idea and have a nice day!

Martin

[1] http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

-- 
Martin Pitt                       http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer            http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Debian GNU/Linux Developer       http://www.debian.org
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