For a few months now (more like two years) I got forced to upgrade the kernel as soon as it was released to make sure that ALSA worked as it should, yes, another thing I feel obliged to do for my maintainership; I never had, lately, to downgrade to a previous kernel version, even if the new versions had their own problems, but today the time came.
So, I’ve installed gentoo-sources-2.6.20, compiled ALSA, all fine (although I know people reported problems with -rt15 and -ck1 kernels; sorry but they seemed to change the API for the modules, which is.. nasty to say the least); start with the the new version to make sure that HAL recognised the card correctly, and then login to X as usual.
KDE starts with the usual three or four windows I care nothing about but are still there, I run xmodmap to load my special keymap for the extra keys on the keyboard, and press the close button… why Amarok appeared?
A quick xev run shows me that some of my keys are aliased one to the other, XF86Close, XF86Excel and XF86Music shows the same 248 keycode… changing the evdev driver didn’t solve anything, I had to start back in 2.6.19 to get my keyboard back.
I don’t really like this feeling, at all.