[Herefordshire] Buried Treasure!

[John Hedges]

> >>I am looking for someone who can tell / show me how to obtain the
> >>BACKSLASH on an IBM 560x Thinkpad laptop. I bought an old banger and now
> >>cannot program the thing !!!
> >>note. I believe the keyboard is an American one?  I have written to IBM
> >>but not had a reply.

> >I've a 560x which came with sticky labels on some of the keys for cheap
> >locale conversion. The backslash and vertical bar key is to the right of
> >the left shift key. Unfortunately it doesn't boot anymore so I can't
> >confirm whether they work but Linux was installed and I don't remember
> >them not working. If those keys are no good have a look at 'man 5
> >locale' to see about changing your keyboard mapping.

> I am all for a cheap local conversion, but being a compleat klutz and a 
> newby to boot, would you spell out in words of one syllable wot 'man 5 
> locale' means as it sounds a distinct possibility. unless of course I 
> have compleatly missed the joke, in which case I bow my head down in shame
> PS.  I do not have the backslash in your position, but over on the 
> extream right side, between the backspace and enter.  This definatly 
> does not show when in DOS.

Very sorry, locale was a complete red herring. However typing 'man 5 locale'
will, at least on my system, give the manual page for the locale file
format. Type 'man man' at the command prompt to learn more about man
pages. man pages are very useful indeed.

Perhaps what you want is the loadkeys command. (See man loadkeys). This
works for console mode (ie non windowed). To load the us keymap (most
likely for your 560x) try:

$ loadkeys us

If you are using X windows then you probably need to edit the relevant
section in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 - 'man XF86Config-4' gives plenty of
information. My XF86Config-4 has the following section:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Keyboard0"
    Driver      "keyboard"
    Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"
    Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
    Option "XkbLayout" "gb"
EndSection

You might need to substitute 'gb' with 'us'. If you hunt around you will
probably find a configuration tool for your X windows or window manager,
Gnome, KDE etc., but a simple text editor should do the trick.

John