# sysinstall keyboard layout



## sergeylukin (Jan 10, 2015)

Hi,
I'm installing FreeBSD 4.3 on old 486 ThinkPad 340 with 12mb RAM via floppies. Inserted kern.flp - all is fine, inserted mfsroot.flp when prompted and pressed <Enter> - all is fine, kernel booted and provided 3 options (continue to sysinstall, visual kernel config, cli kernel config), entered cli config and typed some commands without changing anything - keyboard layout is mapped just fine, quit config, proceed to sysinstall and here keyboard layout is completely messed - F2 behaves as "c" keystroke, F5 behaves as "s", RSHIFT as "F1" etc.

What am I doing wrong and how can I fix the keyboard mapping in sysinstall?

Thanks

P.S. Am not currently sure where this question fits better so I posted it to freebsd-doc@freebsd.org as well. Sorry if that caused too much of noise to you.


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## wblock@ (Jan 10, 2015)

FreeBSD 4.3 was released in April 2001.  It is going to be difficult to find someone who remembers how keymaps were configured back then.


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## sergeylukin (Jan 11, 2015)

Well I'd be glad to at least know how keymaps are configured in more recent releases. I'd hopefully be able to draw a parallel for the 4.3 myself then. Btw I tried sysinstall bundled with 5.* and faced just the same problem there.
Thanks for reply wblock@


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## getopt (Jan 11, 2015)

What keyboard layout does that Thinkpad have?
And what are you actually trying to do with sysinstall?


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## sergeylukin (Jan 11, 2015)

getopt ThinkPad 340 has standard US keyboard layout.
Keymap is perfect when FreeBSD is booted, I can actually configure devices in kernel via CLI with no problem if I choose so - all keys are recognized properly until sysinstall(8) starts, inside sysinstall(8) all keys are completely messed up. I could find same issue posted back in 1999 by someone trying to install FreeBSD on ThinkPad 360c: https://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org/msg03120.html

As of what I'm trying to do - I'm trying to install FreeBSD 4.3 by following handbook installation guide, and according to the handbook, sysinstall(8) is the way to install FreeBSD 4.3.

Actually I'd be happy to try install FreeBSD 4.3 without sysinstall(8) , but I couldn't find documentation on that path.

I just learned that sysinstall(8) may be configured via install.cfg and actually found some nice templates but none of them contain anything regarding keyboard mapping.

Also I was thinking about the flags for atkbd or syscons devices. Currently they are set to 0x1 and 0x0. I tried to set multiple values with no good result so far.


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