Fedora 21 and Chromebook 15

[stan]

On Thu, 8 Oct 2015 17:56:42 -0400
Gary Mann <archvilen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello
> 
> I recently purchased a Acer CB5-571-58HF and installed Fedora 21 on it
> using MATE as my window manager. Everything seems to run perfectly.
> However, I'm really annoyed with the keyboard because everything I've
> tried doesn't seem to work... After a couple of updates it seems like
> the volume and brightness keys work by default. What I really want
> though, is a home, end, delete, pageup/down, and insert buttons. I've
> tried setting these buttons up behind xbindkeys or xmodmap, and for
> whatever reason, it doesn't seem to work everywhere.
> 
> For example, the default keyboard schema supports pressing Shift + Up
> as PageUp, Shift + Down as PageDown. These two combinations will work
> in mate-terminal, however if I try to use them in google-chrome, or
> pretty much anything else they don't. Also, Shift + Left is Home, but
> using it in a terminal instead will shift the view all the way to the
> top of the buffer instead of moving the cursor to the beginning of
> the line, this is also the same for Shift + Right, which is Prior, it
> instead is used to move the view all the way to the bottom of the
> buffer.
> 
> I would love to get Shift + BackSpace as Delete and Ctrl + Shift +
> BackSpace as Insert, but I've not had any luck doing so with xmodmap
> or xbindkeys...
> 
> Has anyone used a Chromebook on Fedora and experienced similar
> issues, and if so would you be able to provide any details on how you
> corrected them, pertaining to the keyboard schema?
> 
> Thanks.

I don't have this hardware and haven't solved your problem.  But I have
a workaround to suggest.  You could go into the X kbmap that you use,
say
/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us
and add the keymappings you want to have directly.  The intl version of
the kbmap, has all modifiers enabled, so you might find some
combinations that are irrelevant to you, and overwrite them with your
needs.

There is obviously a learning curve to do it this way.  This is what
xbindkeys or xmodmap should be doing, and hiding from you, but aren't,
for some reason.  Maybe they will work if you enable the intl keyboard,
and then modify mappings you won't need.

An even more involved solution is to create a custom keymap, a major
undertaking even if you copy your current keymapping and modify it.
The advantage is that you can transfer it to your next iteration of
Fedora, while with the simpler solution you will have to edit the kbmap
file every time you upgrade.