Bug#261219: Nasty "Error activating XKB" message

[Margarita Manterola]

retitle #261219 Error activating XKB message, no functionality lost
thanks

Lot's of people have been hit with this bug.  This __seems__ to be related
to a lack of sync between the symbols in the Xserver and the ones seen by
Gnome.

This bug has affected at least Debian, Red Hat and Slackware, and I expect
that many users of other distributions as well.  This is to say, this bug
seems to be obviously Gnome's fault, the rest of the libraries in the
distributions usually differ and it would be weird for this problem to be
present everywhere.

In a common Debian box, this can probably be fixed by upgrading to the
latest xlibs package.  In a thin client, where the Xserver and Gnome are in
different machines, with different versions of the packages this is not
easy to fix.

I'm running a thin client with PXES and Xfree86 4.3, that connects to a
GNOME 2.8 server.  This is the output of the commands:

marga@fobos:~$ xprop -root | grep XKB
_XKB_RULES_NAMES(STRING) = "xfree86", "pc101", "la", "", ""
marga@fobos:~$ gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/xkb
 layouts = [la]
 model = pc105
 overrideSettings = false
 options = []
 update_handlers = []

(I know that it should say pc105 in the first command output, this is
because I forgot to add that as a parameter to my boot image, but it makes
no difference whatsoever to the XKB error).

I recon this bug is only gnome-settings-daemon fault, it should not give a
nasty error message if nothing is actually working wrong.

BTW, I have gotten rid of this message by recompiling gnome-settings-daemon
not to do this checking, as explained on
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=286220#msg9
(this is an ugly hack, but no functionality is lost, and it gets rid of the
nasty message).

-- 
 Bessos,    (o_
    Marga.  (\)_