[fpc-devel] Linux kernel behaviour change regarding keyboard

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Wed, 18 Jul 2007, schreef Michael Van Canneyt:

> > The "scary" thing is the setuid root. The communication channel can be 
> > standard i/o and there is nothing scary about that.
> 
> There is: a user using the keyboard unit should then distribute the
> (setuid) program too, and that is not acceptable. (not for me as an FPC
> developer, and most likely also not fot the user) So if you want to go 
> through with this, develop a separate keyboard driver for linux console
> that can catch all keys. But not the standard driver.

Yes, but again no difference from a wrapper that launches the program. I 
fully agree that it would suck to have to distribute such a wrapper or 
helper and that it would need to be optional.

> I understand. But spawning an external setuid process and talking to that 
> just to get a text mode thing working in some weird cases is not one, 
> but two bridges too far for me...
> 
> I mean, seriously, how many people develop on the Linux console ?
> You can't even open a browser then ! I expect most people do
> their work in an X-Term if they use the fp ide...

Many people indeed use X. But on the Linux console, thanks to fbdev, you 
can get a really comfortable text mode (i.e. 1024x768 with a high res 8x16 
font is still a 128x48 text mode). This makes make you can see large 
amounts of source at the same time, combined with a speed and 
responsiveness of a text mode UI.

Compared to xterm, you get the VGA character set instead of the limited 
VT100 character set and the keyboard works better (for example shift+tab 
is impossible in xterm).

Therefore, console is popular as well.

> > By the way, I have started to talk to Andrew Morton and his reply was 
> > constructive. Perhaps a proper solution is possible after all.
> 
> Great, that is the way to go !! 
> 
> Please, keep us updated on any progress you make on this :-)

Sure!

Daniël