Keymapping problems again.

[kilgota banach math auburn edu]

I had this problem some time ago and finally did some I-forget-what kind 
of magic to deal with it. This time it is really weird, because the 
problem does not affect all users. What was the "cause" of the problem is 
that I ran out of disk space, upgraded to a much larger hard drive, and 
while I was at it I upgraded the operating system from Slackware-12.0 to 
Slackware-current, which appears to me to be in the last stages before 
the next release. I did the upgrade in part because there were a rather 
huge number of security patches to apply, in any event.


Here is the problem:

1. Start up X (fvwm2, no fancy desktop) as a user.

then

2. Open an xterm and start MC. No problems. Everything nice.

3. In an xterm, do "su" and give the password to do a root session in that 
window.

Then, in the root window only, the Alt key followed by a keystroke (Alt-s 
for search the directory, for example) will print a funny character at the 
command line and otherwise will not do what it is supposed to do. As I 
said, this does not happen if one is a user. Moreover, the Cntrl key has 
taken over the abilities of the Alt key in addition to its own. For 
example, Cntrl-s will permit the downward search of the directory, and 
Cntrl-Enter will bring something down to the command line now, instead of 
Alt-Enter, which does not work. Again, all of these things continue to 
work as they should if one is a user, in the same X session.

The contents of the .mc directory are identical for both user and root. I 
am sure this would be the first question so I answered it here.

Also (anticipating second question), does this happen in the regular 
terminal and not in X? No.

As I said, this problem happened to me once before. But last time it was 
for both user and root. Here, it is root only and not user, who has the 
problem. Thus, it would seem to be a permissions problem, but where, and 
how to cure it? If it is a permissions problem, of course, the problem 
could be somewhere in the X setup. In that case it would not be a ball 
lying in the MC court, obviously. But has anyone else encountered this 
kind of thing? Are there any reasonable measures which MC setup could use, 
in order to avoid this happening?

Theodore Kilgore