RH7J vs. JIS keyboard layout

["SN_Diamond" <Norman.Diamond@example.com>]

This time, an answer!  But not to any of the questions I asked here.

Red Hat 7J contains corrupt configuration files for the JIS 106-key keyboard
layout (i.e. the layout which 99% of their Japanese customers surely have).
Simon McCorkindale reported the problem in RH 6.2J and RH gave it "normal"
priority.  After all, who needs to input characters like an underscore and
two others, and who needs to remember which characters match the keycaps vs.
which characters think they came from a US keyboard layout?  For other
national layouts RH gave this problem a high priority, but for Japanese, no,
looks like it'll never be fixed.

Anyway, in 1 out of my 4 installations of RH 7J, the keyboard worked right
away!  The trick seemed to be to install the "server" configuration AND
select to customize packages during installation AND make sure that X11 gets
in during the initial installation.  As far as I could tell, the
configuration files were still broken, but the keyboard magically worked
anyway.

For the others, I found that /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 is the magic file that
needs editing.  Find the string "jp" and change it to "jp106".  I'm still
not sure why this fixes it either though.  As far as I can tell, several
other configuration files are still involved in mapping the keyboard and
some of them are still broken.

By the way Dr. Breen, notice that RH 6.2J had a .2 in it.  It's no use
waiting for any version at all.  We can get broken Linux systems for free or
we can buy broken Windows 2000 systems for money.  Except, my employer paid
money for RH 7.0J.  But it was still cheaper than W2000, especially if
several dozen clients decide they want to connect.

Yours sincerely,
Norman Diamond