Stephan Sokolow's Blog

If you’ve ever poked around in the KDE or GNOME control panels, you know that the X11 keyboard system is very customizable and, as the KDE keyboard controls clearly show, that it’s all done using a little command named setxkbmap.

The problem is, Google isn’t very helpful if you want to use this tool directly. All the results seem to tell you to read the raw config files or only give you single, purpose-specific examples.

The good news is that your system actually DOES include a single file equivalent to (and probably the source for) the listings you get in the GUI tools:

/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst

For those who haven’t used KDE and need an example, here’s the command I run on login (These can also be specified in xorg.conf via Option directives, but I prefer something I can keep in my roaming profile):

setxkbmap \
  -variant altgr-intl \
  -option \
  -option compose:rctrl \
  -option lv3:ralt_switch \
  -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bkspc \
  -option eurosign:e \
  -option nbsp:level3n

As usual, the backslashes are only necessary if you’re splitting it across multiple lines. Here’s what they actually do when used with a us104 or us105 layout:

-variant altgr-intl

The default variant of the US 104 layout doesn’t have tertiary symbols like ¢ and þ for AltGr to access, so I’m selecting one that does.

You can also use the intl variant here but, for some reason, it maps ² to AltGr+2 and ³ to AltGr+3 but ¹ to AltGr+Shift+1.

-option

An empty -option resets the layout options so I’m starting from a clean slate.

-option compose:rctrl

This remaps the Control_R keysym to Compose, so I can access glyphs like ½, ±, and é by typing “Ctrl 1 2” or “Ctrl + -" or "Ctrl e '“.

-option lv3:ralt_switch

This remaps Alt_R to AltGr, granting access to ¬ (AltGr+\) for making ¬_¬ smileys and giving me simpler key combos for commonly-used glyphs like µ (AltGr+m) and © (AltGr+c).

You can also use ralt_switch_multikey here to make Shift+AltGr the Compose key on compact keyboards but my muscle memory has already settled on Control_R. (Note: Make sure you press Shift first or it’ll just send an ordinary AltGr+Shift)

Note:If anyone knows why ¬ is no longer on AltGr+`, please leave a comment.

-option terminate:ctrl_alt_bkspc

Restore Ctrl+Alt+Backspace as the “Kill X Server” shortcut without relying on a superior but root-privileged and Linux-only config tweak.

(Again, I like settings I can store in my roaming profile)

-option eurosign:e

I’m Canadian, so on the occasions I need to type €, it can take me a while to remember that it has two cross-bars so I know to use “Compose e =“. Since my muscle memory already uses “Compose e '” for é anyway, let’s remap AltGr+e to €.

-option nbsp:level3n

Lets me type non-breaking spaces with AltGr+Space for those times when   doesn’t have special meaning.

Using level3n rather than level3 lets me type thin non-breaking spaces with Shift+AltGr+Space.

The beauty of doing things this way is that you’re unlikely to break things badly. It’s nearly impossible to paint yourself into a corner using variants and options alone (It’s models and layouts you have to be careful with) and, if you ever try to apply your settings to a keyboard they weren’t intended for, an unrecognized variant will abort the process and unrecognized options will simply have no effect.

Have fun and, if you’ve got any other interesting keyboard tweaks, share them in the comments. If I like one that applies to us104 enough to use it myself, I’ll update the example in the post body.

Given the recent focus on harmful attempts at law like SOPA and ACTA, I’ve spent more than the usual amount of time, lately, thinking on why it’s so hard to build up a stable, strong political movement and I’ve narrowed it down to two fundamental psychological problems that activists often don’t seem to address:

First, that humans are creatures of habit, yet activists seem obsessed with converting the general public to their cause. I can’t count the number of causes I’ve sympathized with but lost interest in because the only option they offered me for participation was, in essence, a firehose of all the day-to-day details of their fight. As an activist, you need to accept that not everyone can be made to care about your cause as deeply as you do. Provide services for all levels of engagement, so people who just want to be notified of new petitions and phone-call campaigns won’t be overwhelmed while those who want more can easily step up to the next level of involvement.

Second, that we instinctively desire, on an emotional level, a clear victory which our opponent acknowledges… something which activism doesn’t provide. Activists struggle against parties who will never concede defeat and we must find ways to help people focus on incremental victories and long-term trends, rather than dwelling on the occasional inevitable loss or being demoralized by the endless nature of the struggle against selfishness.

Finally, while not a point about psychology in and of itself, the adage “It’s always darkest before the dawn” does characterize activism quite well. Opponents never fight harder than when they’re desperate and, in the case of the current battle against online censorship, SOPA and ACTA will quite probably, if defeated, prove to be the turning point in the fight for freedom from the old media oligarchies.

Update: Though, as Cory Doctorow points out, that’s just a fragment of the issue. The real fight is for the right to use our computer-based technologies without government-mandated spyware locking down what we can and can’t do with them.

TL;DR: Porteus modules here

Roughly two weeks ago, my main PC died and, since I didn’t feel like re-ripping 2.5TiB of movies and music, I spent two weeks of playing Towers of Hanoi with my media library to squeeze it all onto either my brothers’ PCs or one of 100 DVD+Rs.

With that finished and my backup PC (too slow) and backup backup PC (too little expansion room) part-way to being comfortable, I’ve come to several conclusions:

First, that I need to prioritize the completion and enhancement of my roaming profile. (Already in progress with my goal being to use it, a Lubuntu CD, and Dropbox to go from blank hard drive to comfortable PC in under two hours.)

Second, that 32-bit Porteus is the best LiveUSB Linux distro I’ve ever tried and, aside from backsliding on the UI since it was called Slax (something I may volunteer to fix eventually), it’s great… but it doesn’t have all the modules (packages, basically) I want and lacks Slax’s big, community-populated collection.

Therefore, I’ve taken it upon myself to build modules for everything I want.

Some of them (like BasKet Note Pads and Filelight) are converted Slax modules that still work perfectly well, many are converted Slackware packages which have been adjusted if necessary, and some are converted Debian packages.

It’s actually not that hard to do (the website has instructions and Porteus comes with conversion scripts) but it can be somewhat time-consuming so I’m offering the ones I create in case they help anyone else. (I really don’t have the time to be a maintainer in any official sense, or I’d see if the Porteus guys are interested. These’ll probably only get updated when it causes me problems.)

Feel free to use them or not. If you want to verify that I haven’t done anything funny to them, they’re generally easy to match to Slackware, Debian, or Slax packages/modules and diff -ur will tell you the rest.

A few days ago, my main machine went kaput and I needed a fast way to copy several hundred gigs of data to a slow, old 2Ghz Celeron. Thus began my search for the lightest file-copying solution I could find. So far, that’s tar with netcat.

The problem is that netcat, while a swiss army knife, is also very much a power-user’s tool and, with at least three flavors and multiple versions of each in use, the instructions for using netcat with tar to copy files are often using a subtly incompatible syntax.

It also doesn’t help that, because netcat has no clue what you’re planning to do with it, it takes a little experimentation to figure out which instructions match up with your expectations for how a file-moving tool should behave.

Here is a little wrapper script I wrote myself (¾ comments) to keep the use of tar+netcat simple and easy to remember. Use it as you will.

If you aren’t on a LAN and bandwidth is more the issue, you can either compress the tar stream the same way you’d compress a tar archive (check out lzop for something lighter on the CPU than gzip) or you can use a tool like rsync which will only transfer changes and makes resuming an interrupted transfer effortless.

You may also want to check out these pages for alternatives:

• How to transfer large amounts of data via network
• BackupYourSystem – Ubuntu Wiki (Also BackupYourSystem/TAR)