Compositing fun, Alt-key, Trident driver

[Keith Packard]

Around 13 o'clock on Jan 4, Joel Dice wrote:

> One thing I've noticed is that my right Alt-key has no effect under
> Xserver.  It works fine when using the same window manager under XFree86.
> All the other keys, including the left Alt-key and both Ctrl-keys work
> fine.  Any suggestions as to how to fix this would be most appreciated.

Your window manager may be looking for a key with a different keysym; 
kdrive advertises the actual keysyms as reported by the kernel keyboard 
driver, so your 'alt' keys will have only 'Alt_L' and 'Alt_R' keysyms 
while your window manager may be looking for 'Meta_L' and 'Meta_R'.  You 
can either fix the window manager to accept either keysym, or use xmodmap 
to add the Meta keysyms to the Alt keys.

> Finally, can anyone tell me what state the Trident driver is in?  The CVS
> history suggests that it hasn't been touched in three years, and the build
> process does not include it.

My laptop with a trident chip in it has a dead battery, so I haven't used 
that server in years.  Without compositing support, it won't really help 
all that much to accelerate it, so you may be just as well off running 
Xvesa or Xfbdev.  But, if you do get excited about fixing up the Trident 
driver, feel free to update the code.  The work probably mostly involves 
stealing code from another working driver.  It would be nice if we could 
find a way to reduce the amount of code duplicated among the various 
drivers...

-keith