Norman Diamond wrote:
Ian Barwick wrote:
I'm based temporarily in Japan and have acquired a 109 key USB Japanese keyboard for my laptop (running SuSE 9.0). It works fine, apart from the five "extra" keys (backslash, yen-sign and the three "henkan" keys around the spacebar),
The backslash and yen-sign keys are not "extra".
"Extra" in the sense meant here: http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/kbd/scancodes-7.html#ss7.1 "Common Japanese keyboards have five additional keys..." FWIW I've just tried the keyboard on another laptop running Windows 98 and the keys work as expected.
Kernel developers have repeatedly broken the input of the backslash and yen-sign keys, especially on USB keyboards, but sometimes on PS/2 keyboards too. Sometimes I could fix it myself, sometimes I needed help. My fixes have always been ignored. But one time I finally convinced someone who isn't a kernel developer, and he persuaded a kernel developer to fix it, which he did, though not using my fix.
If you can install a kernel from the 2.4 series (probably anything after 2.4.10 or thereabouts) then it should work for you. Rumour has it that the latest 2.6 series (probably 2.6.5) works too, but I haven't tested it yet.
Using 2.4.21 (SuSE stock kernel).
Other actual "extra" keys (hankaku/zenkaku/Kanji, Microsoft sperm key, Sperm key? Ah, I see what you mean ;-). I use the left one to switch input modes.
muhenkan, henkan, hiragana/katakana/Ro-maji, and Microsoft other key) usually don't need to produce any input in Linux. I'm not sure if ATOK uses the Japanese henkan keys, but the usual (free) Linux IMEs don't.
Having googled around a bit I suspect this is one of these low-level kernel problems and I haven't, alas, got time to start mucking about with patches and stuff :-(. A project for a rainy day, perhaps. Fortunately I can type "blind" with the English layout so will leave it at that for the moment. Thanks for the reply Ian Barwick