Re: MacBook2,1 keyboard and touchpad issues on GuixSD

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Albin <address@hidden> skribis:

> 1. The manual doesn't explain how to (in the installer)
>      (a) list the available keymaps
>      (b) load a keymap
>      (c) enable the selected keymap in the system that is to be installed.

Right.  Currently the installer is rough on the edges as you’ve seen,
but it would be good to a least give pointers to ‘loadkeys’ and similar
commands.

Would you like to propose a patch?  The manual lives in doc/guix.texi in
the repository.

> 2. After having figured out the names of the keymaps (by looking at a
> different GNU distro) I had another minor problem.  I wanted to use
> `se-fi-ir209` but it didn't work to load it directly.  Instead I had to
> first run `loadkeys se-ir209` and then `se-fi-ir209`.  An example of
> what happened when I tried to load `se-fi-ir209` directly was that the
> buttons SHIFT+9 and SHIFT+0 printed `(` and `)` respectively instead of
> `)` and `=` which are the correct ones.

I’m afraid I don’t fully understand what’s supposed to happen and what
doesn’t work here.

> 3. After installing the system with full disk encryption I first
> couldn't boot the OS properly because the keyboard wasn't recognized in
> time---before I was asked to enter the LUKS password.  The solution was
> to add the following kernel modules to the initial RAM disk:
> `hid-generic`, `hid` and `hid-apple`.

Great.  This issue is being discussed at <http://bugs.gnu.org/20433> and
we were waiting for confirmation of exactly which modules need to be
added to the initrd.

The initrd already contains ‘usbhid’ by default.  From what I can see,
all that’s missing is ‘hid-generic’ and ‘hid-apple’:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ gunzip -c < /run/current-system/initrd | cpio -tv | grep hid
-r--r--r--   1 root     root       207688 Jan  1  1970 
./gnu/store/z0xxbhn83bfiiwwlmxdp7r623p3swnzk-linux-modules/hid.ko
-r--r--r--   1 root     root        90880 Jan  1  1970 
./gnu/store/z0xxbhn83bfiiwwlmxdp7r623p3swnzk-linux-modules/usbhid.ko
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Is there a risk of conflict if we load all these drivers?  If not, let’s
just add them.

> 4. The media keys that control e.g. LCD brightness and sound level don't
> work out of the box.  I haven't found a solution to this yet but maybe
> `pommed` (not yet packaged in GuixSD) could take care of this.

OK.  Someone™ should package it, then.

> 5. After entering Xfce I discovered that the touchpad behaved strangely.
>  The cursor could only move in a vertical line for example.  When
> opening "Session and upstart" I discovered a service named `AT-SPI D-Bus
> Bus`.  I enabled it and restarted Xfce after which the touchpad had a
> better but not ideal behaviour: I could now move the cursor normally but
> apart from that only left click was working (using the physical mouse
> button).  This touchpad should be able to recognize tapping so that one
> can also have "right click", "middle click", two finger scrolling and
> other gestures.  I believe there is a problem with the synaptics driver.
>  Maybe it's in conflict with another driver.

No idea about that one.  Could it be that our Xorg is not loading the
right input driver(s)?  Could you compare /var/log/Xorg.0.log with what
you get on a “working” distro?

> As you can see I managed to fix some of the issues but a few remain.
> I'd really appreciate any help with the media keys and touchpad.

Thanks for sharing your problems and solution—that’s how we
incrementally manage to improve things.

So you have a fully-encrypted system, with an unencrypted /boot, right?
Does the grub.cfg generated by ‘guix system’ work for you?  Did you have
to run the ‘insmod’ and ‘cryptomount’ commands in GRUB as reported at
<http://bugs.gnu.org/21843>?

Thanks,
Ludo’.