Beginner questions

dek20 · February 20, 2020, 10:48pm

Hi,

I’ve recently installed Haiku OS–hrev53894 as of this posting–on a USB stick in order to take it for a spin–using a Thinkpad x240. Most things seem to work out of the box, and it looks promising, but I have a few questions.

How can I remap Caps Lock to Ctrl?
How can I see the kernel log, i.e. what’s the equivalent of dmesg from the Linux world?
How do I check if Haiku is using the Intel graphics driver?
Closing the lid does nothing, is there any way to make the laptop suspend when I close the lid?

Thanks.

X512 · February 20, 2020, 11:43pm

You can try Keymap preference.

Kernel log is located in /boot/system/var/log/syslog.

You can open Screen preference and see caption above display image. “VESA” or “framebuffer” means fallback driver. You can also check loaded kernel modules with listimage. Note that Intel driver is not faster than fallback driver because it doen’t provide hardware acceleration, it just add some features like vsync, back-light brightness control and mirroring to secondary display.

Haiku doesn’t support sleep mode yet.

PulkoMandy · February 21, 2020, 7:34am

More precisely, you can right-click drag keys around to swap them.

humdinger · February 21, 2020, 4:19pm

Normal, left-drag actually. A right-click gives you a context menu with a “Remove” item. Which deletes the mapping for a key, does that make sense even? I see it creating more problems that it might solve - “Hey, I deleted my M-key… ”.

Great, welcome dek20! JFYI, it’s just “Haiku”, never Haiku.

WRT 4, I don’t think Haiku supports suspend/hibernate. It boots quite quickly though…

jjpx · February 21, 2020, 5:09pm

might have a use if a bad key presses itself just out of gravity?

MrEntropy · February 21, 2020, 5:17pm

Only a duy would reove their -key.

dek20 · February 21, 2020, 6:53pm

Thanks for your replies everyone :).

I’ve played with with the keymap preference and I can swap keys around, but I can’t re-assign Caps Lock to be a second Ctrl. That migh be good enough, though. I had a look at the source code of the KeyMap preferences app, but I couldn’t find where the swap behaviour is implemented. I see there’s support for saving and restoring key maps from files, so it migt be possible to re-map Ctrl to Caps Lock. I’ll give it a go over the weekend.

Looks like my laptop is supported by the Intel graphics driver. Nice work!

Thanks! Got it

Great job on Haiku everyone. It looks like a nice system, and I’m looking forward to using it more.

humdinger · February 21, 2020, 6:56pm

The caps-lock key has a context menu on right click that seems to offer re-mapping all kinds of modifier keys. WRT to editing saved keymaps, the user guide has some info on that.

PulkoMandy · February 21, 2020, 8:01pm

You can always drag in more characters from elsewhere, for example CharacterMap. And it’s easy to restart customizing from one of the templates, too.

humdinger · February 23, 2020, 4:15pm

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that! I amended the userguide with:

You can also create an individual mapping by drag & dropping a character from another app onto the key. For example, you could extend your regular keymap with often used currency symbols. Just click on the CONTROL key and drag & drop the pound symbol from CharacterMap onto the ‘P’ key to get a ₤ when you press CTRL P.
By right-clicking a normal key, the context menu offers to Remove its mapping. Modifier keys can have alternative mappings, like using CAPS LOCK as CTRL key: