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stultumanto

Member

Registered: 2023-12-12

Posts: 96  

Migrated Trixie install not loading hwdb rules

Tonight I migrated a Debian Trixie install to Excalibur using the instructions on the Devuan site. Almost everything seems to be working, except that my custom hwdb keyboard rules now aren't loading. They'd been working on Debian before the migration, and they are still working on another partition on the same PC, which was always running Devuan. It seems something specific about the migration broke hwdb, though.

Unfortunately these rules are kind of important, because my left control key is entirely broken off. It's an old laptop, with no replacement keyboard available. I have a file at /etc/udev/hwdb.d/99-keyboard.hwdb that remaps caps lock to left ctrl. Here's the contents of the file:

evdev:name:AT Translated Set 2 keyboard:*
 KEYBOARD_KEY_3a=leftctrl

(I cut down the rules to just this one for troubleshooting purposes.) I verified that the timestamp on /etc/udev/hwdb.bin is being refreshed when I run udevadm hwdb --update. In the past, running udevadm trigger would always load any rule changes immediately. I could verify them with udevadm info /dev/input/by-path/platform-i8042-serio-0-event-kbd. Now, however, nothing ever changes, not even after I reboot.

If it matters, I run pretty "barebones" systems. I don't have elogind installed on my machines. However, I saw that installing it was part of the migration instructions, so I did as I was instructed. Still, I wonder if my system is too different from the expected configuration for the migration process to work properly. Maybe I should just start over from scratch at this point.

g4sra

Member

Registered: 2018-12-12

Posts: 70  

Re: Migrated Trixie install not loading hwdb rules

No experience of any of this, my comments below are worth exactly what you pay for them (nothing).

My first foray would be to investigate if usrmerge has broken something.
Make sure the files being accessed are the right files in the right place with appropriate permissions.
I would personally resort to 'strace udevadm ....' as I am used to reading its output and catching unexpected behaviour.