MacBook2,1 keyboard and touchpad issues on GuixSD

[Albin <albin@fripost.org>]

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Dear GuixSD hackers,

These are the keyboard- and touchpad-related issues that I've
experienced when installing GuixSD with LUKS full disk encryption on a
librebooted Macbook2,1:

1. The manual doesn't explain how to (in the installer)
     (a) list the available keymaps
     (b) load a keymap
     (c) enable the selected keymap in the system that is to be installed.

2. After having figured out the names of the keymaps (by looking at a
different GNU distro) I had another minor problem.  I wanted to use
`se-fi-ir209` but it didn't work to load it directly.  Instead I had to
first run `loadkeys se-ir209` and then `se-fi-ir209`.  An example of
what happened when I tried to load `se-fi-ir209` directly was that the
buttons SHIFT+9 and SHIFT+0 printed `(` and `)` respectively instead of
`)` and `=` which are the correct ones.

3. After installing the system with full disk encryption I first
couldn't boot the OS properly because the keyboard wasn't recognized in
time---before I was asked to enter the LUKS password.  The solution was
to add the following kernel modules to the initial RAM disk:
`hid-generic`, `hid` and `hid-apple`.

4. The media keys that control e.g. LCD brightness and sound level don't
work out of the box.  I haven't found a solution to this yet but maybe
`pommed` (not yet packaged in GuixSD) could take care of this.

5. After entering Xfce I discovered that the touchpad behaved strangely.
 The cursor could only move in a vertical line for example.  When
opening "Session and upstart" I discovered a service named `AT-SPI D-Bus
Bus`.  I enabled it and restarted Xfce after which the touchpad had a
better but not ideal behaviour: I could now move the cursor normally but
apart from that only left click was working (using the physical mouse
button).  This touchpad should be able to recognize tapping so that one
can also have "right click", "middle click", two finger scrolling and
other gestures.  I believe there is a problem with the synaptics driver.
 Maybe it's in conflict with another driver.

As you can see I managed to fix some of the issues but a few remain.
I'd really appreciate any help with the media keys and touchpad.


Best regards,

Albin


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