Thursday, February 26, 2009

Follow-up: using dialup on 11.1 without NetworkManager...

This https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=429772#c22 is the "official" documentation. It's the same what Marius already wrote in his comment on my last post on the topic, but I'll mention it here again, so that it gets found more easily.

Monday, February 09, 2009

How to get the pipe symbol on a US keyboard?

Yesterday at FOSDEM 2009, I was asked in an interview done by linux-community.de's Nils Magnus, "how do you get the pipe symbol on keyboards without that extra key" (which "international" keyboards have, but US keyboards don't).
Apart from that question being off-topic, as the interview was supposed to be about my netbook talk I had held just before, it's funny that I knew the answer offhand, since I am very often in the situation to use a german keymap on a US keyboard. So here it is:

Copy this into your .Xmodmap:

! use altgr-# as pipe - if i have an US keyboard
! without key 86, i can use this as pipe.
keycode 51 = numbersign apostrophe bar bar bar bar


Then make sure that "Xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap" is run during login. I think this is done by /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.common, but don't quote me on that.

So now you have the pipe on "AltGr - #" (On a german keyboard. With the US keycaps it is "AltGr - |", which is not too inconvenient).
The "<" and ">" characters, which are also on this key (again, with a german layout), can be easily be typed by "AltGr - Shift - Y" for "<" and "AltGr - Shift - X" for ">".

Maybe this is helpful to somebody besides me.

Have fun ;)