debian: document XFCE4 Keyboard stuff

1 files changed, 27 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/software/debian.page b/software/debian.page
index c2767fc..61226bb 100644
--- a/software/debian.page
+++ b/software/debian.page
@@ -120,3 +120,30 @@ of the header folders in /usr/src, then run `apt-get install -f` and `apt-get
 autoremove`.
 
 See also: http://mike.mcmurray.co.nz/2012/11/apport-disk-full-error-using-apt-get/
+
+XFCE4 Keyboard Settings Broken Under Jessie: xfsettingsd
+----------------------------------------------------------
+I had a very strange problem after running a dist-upgrade with debian jessie.
+This was on a laptop which was installed fresh with jessie while it was still
+testing (around December 2014); I ran dist-upgrade in April 2015 around (or a
+bit before) the official Jessie release.
+
+After updating packages and rebooting, my XFCE4 application keyboard bindings
+were broken (eg, Super+t for xterm). Other symptoms were that system fonts got
+subjectively uglier. The weird thing was that windows manager bindings (eg,
+Super+F11 to maximize vertically) still worked. I keep my XFCE4 settings under
+version control, along with the rest of my dotfiles, so initially I assumed
+there had been some backwards incompatible change... I also suspected that
+maybe the window manager initiation process had changed. My old .xinitrc has
+always needed small tweaks for new OS releases.
+
+In the end, the problem seems to have been that ``xfsettingsd`` had crashed and
+would not restart on new logins. Simply running this command from a terminal in
+X11 once somehow magically fixed the problem, and ``xfsettingsd`` runs (with
+corrected ``--sm-client-id`` arguments et al) on reboot, and my old keyboard
+settings all work as expected.
+
+I tried a number of smaller fixes (including wiping ``~/.cache/settings`` from
+the console), so it may have been one of those changes that ultimately fixed
+everything.
+