Use right alt as Windows key in Debian Squeeze

My Thinkpad has no Windows key, so I was using a startup file with xmodmap commands to map my right alt to the Windows key (Super_L).

That worked great until I updated Debian to Squeeze. Then it would only work if I ran it manually after Gnome came up. I tried several startup scripts with different names including .gnomerc, but my settings just wouldn't stick.

So I decided it must be getting overridden by a later step, probably a step where it checks gnome-keyboard-properties settings and calls setxkbmap, so that resets anything you tried to do in a start-up script.

There is an option in gnome-keyboard-properties for "Left Alt is swapped with Left Win". That causes it to run setxkbmap -option altwin:swap_lalt_lwin I believe. That would work perfectly for me, except I want to map the right alt, not the left alt.

So finally, here is what I came up with (probably not the right solution, but it works). I edited all the files in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/ with swap_lalt_lwin in them and added a similar line/section called swap_ralt_lwin. Similarly I edited /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/altwin and added a section at the bottom for swap_ralt_lwin that works similar to the swap_lalt_lwin section.

Debian Lenny to Squeeze on Thinkpad T42

The good:

• Faster bootup.
• Very fast switching between X and a VT.
• Firefox 3.5 is much faster than 3.0.
• Most Thinkpad extra keys now work great out of the box.
• Cool desktop backgrounds.

The bad:

• X11 looked funny. Turns out no themes were installed. Had to install gnome-themes.
• Got a bunch of warnings from udev on bootup, coming from z60_xserver-xorg-input-wacom.rules, so I purged xserver-xorg-input-wacom.
• The ACPI hotkey events changed names, so some hooks I had set up in /etc/acpi/events stopped working until I updated the names.
• EmulateWheel setting in xorg.conf no longer works. xinput works. I installed gpointing-device-settings, which is a very convenient solution.
  
• Alt_R keycode is now 108 instead of 113.

The ugly:

• X wouldn't start. Turns out it was because gdm wasn't installed. Why did gdm get removed during upgrade? Maybe it wanted to replace it with gdm3? But it didn't install gdm3.
  

Samba - How to ignore trusted domains completely

For reasons similar to those mentioned here by Dmitry Butskoy, I needed to make winbind exclude trusted domains. But like he said, "allow trusted domains = no" doesn't seem to affect winbind in this context.

So I built winbindd from source, commenting out the call to rescan_trusted_domains() as Dmitry mentioned here, and it works exactly how I want now!

Looking at the latest version of Samba, 3.5.6, it appears to still not apply that setting in this context. I think rescan_trusted_domains() ought to check lp_allow_trusted_domains() and return if it is false.

If anyone on the Samba team is reading this, I hope you will consider making that change. Hmm, maybe I should submit a patch...

Windows 7 source address selection and unique local addresses

I set up IPv6 on my Linux router, and everything works great, except my Windows 7 box cannot connect to ipv6.google.com, because it uses my unique-local address (ULA) instead of my 6to4 address as the source. Since ULAs are not globally routable, why would Windows even consider using it when connecting to a public address?

The same problem is described here, and the workaround of modifying the prefix policy table does fix it for me, but I too feel it is a hacked/broken solution. (It is however, definitely the correct fix for making Windows prefer IPv6 over IPv4 when connecting to dual stack hosts.)

A "better" workaround I think would be to add a prefix policy of fc00::/7 with its own label and a lower priority. I think that would make it prefer my 6to4 address. Unfortunately, when I run

netsh interface ipv6 add prefixpolicy fc00::/7 4 6

it doesn't add it right :( It shows up as just ::/7, which is the same problem as described here.

So although I believe Windows is using the correct policy table as per RFC 3484, I think it is a bug for Windows to use a ULA as the source when connecting to a public address, and I think it is a bug that it will not let me add a prefix policy for fc00::/7.

Thoughts?

Update (2018-Nov):

Interestingly, in Sep 2012 (about 2 years after this blog post), RFC 6724 came out (replaces RFC 3484), and it does include a policy for fc00::/7 with its own label.  Since current versions of Windows use the policy table defined in RFC 6724, this bug no longer exists.

Wow, I must be prophetic! :)