[gentoo-user] Keyboard Mapping Issues

[daid kahl <daidxor@gmail.com>]

Hello,

After some recent updates, my keyboard shows some strange and
undesirable behavior.  It is a MacBook (no previous keyboard
problems), with US mapping and UTF-8 mode.

Examples: During console login, the key-combination Shift+2 deletes
the whole line, and Shift+3 is a backspace, rather than the characters
'@' and '#' respectively.  However, once logged-in, these keys behave
as expected.  All other keys appear to work correctly.  However, the
"Function" behavior is toggled opposite to previous settings where
they are normal F1-12 keys unless I hit the laptop's Fn key.  Usually
this would be controlled by something like pommed (a small daemon for
Apple computers) or X, but those settings are not respected, and there
seems to be no way to switch the keyboard Function modes anymore.

Yesterday, I updated 18 packages and also the kernel.  Is there some
simple tool in portage to report 1) The local build date of an
installed package 2) Display the emerge history?  Such tools would
assist me in locating the problem, which I assume resulted from an
upgrade.

I know some of the updates included things like removing
device-mapper, updating lvm2 & udev, as well as perhaps kbd.  I
expected these packages could be the problem, but I downgraded all of
them and restored the /etc directory from backup, and the strange
keyboard behavior remains.  (Once I determined nothing in /etc causes
this behavior, I restored the recent /etc directory.)  revdep-rebuild
doesn't show any broken dependencies that I might have missed through
the downgrades.

It is not the kernel or modules, since this behavior is now seen on
all my kernels.

Searching the internet and user-lists did not bring any solutions to
my attention.

Does anyone have some wisdom for me?

Regards,
daid