Re: keyboard problems

Riley Williams
2002-04-19T17:35:59Z

Hi Johannes.

> I got a Sanyo XT with two 5.25 drives and without any harddisk.
> I made a root and a boot floppy on my linux-pc with the command:

> fdformat /dev/fd0d360 ; dd if=boot of=/dev/fd0d360 bs=1k count=360
> fdformat /dev/fd0d360 ; dd if=root of=/dev/fd0d360 bs=1k count=360

> Everything works fine, but when the Login-prompt is shown, and I try
> to type "root", only cracy signs appear.

> I'm using a German keyboard, because I live in Germany. I tried
> several other old keyboards, but none of them worked. Is there
> anyone with a non-us keyboard and knows what to do? Or must I buy
> an US keyboard ?

It's true that the German keyboard has a different layout to the
standard US one, but the general layout is still the same, and you
should still get the standard ASCII characters when you press the keys
on their own.

However, if you're getting "Crazy signs" rather than normal ASCII
characters, you have other problems than that, and the problem is more
likely to be that you need an XT keyboard, but your keyboards are all AT
ones - IBM in their wisdom changed the keyboard protocol between the XT
and the AT, and you need the right one.

Best wishes from Riley.