Aspire V5 - 121 - C72050abb : Keyboard and touchpad problems

masala_wallah
masala_wallah Member Posts: 1 New User

Hi to all,

 

I have recently bought an Aspire V5 in India. It was originally shipped with Linpus, a Debian-based Linux distribution, but as soon as I got the machine into my hands, I installed a recent openSUSE (v12.3, 64 bit, KDE).

 

Now I still have two issues, where the first (and less grave) almost certainly has to do with the hardware, while for the second (much more annoying), I am not sure whether the hardware or openSUSE is to blame.

 

(1) After boot, the touchpad is always in a locked state. I have to press CTRL+FN+F7 to release it. Is there anything to do about it?

 

(2) I cannot make the compose key work. Since the Compose Key feature is rarely used, I could not get any helpful response from the openSUSE community.

 

Quickly said, it is possible to assign one or more compose keys, and xmodmap will report them as Compose (called Multi_key in xmodmap). However, they don't compose anything and just behave like empty keys. This ight be related to imperfect hardware detection: The Keyboard was originally detected as “Generic 101 key PC”, and I tried a couple of Acer-specific layouts (called “Acer Laptop”, “Acer AirKey V” etc) to no avail.

 

Maybe someone here who has still the original Linpus on his disk can direct me to the source of the problem. As I don't know Linpus, I cannot say how a compose key is assigned there (if it uses KDE, probably Configure Desktop -> Input Devices -> Keyboard -> Advanced); otherwise, from the command line it can be done following the directions in  /etc/X11/Xmodmap (uncomment the three relevant lines, save them to a file and run xmodmap on it).

 

A working compose key should emit accented characters if invoked with a valid Compose sequence; for example, <Compose> <Single Quote> <A> should give an A with an acute accent (Á), or <Compose> <c> <c> shold give a c with a caron accent (č). This should work in any application, even in a console/xterm window, because it is bound to X11.

 

Any thoughts that direct me towards a solution are highly appreciated.

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