So today I learned that emerge xorg-server with USE=hal is a very bad idea. When I relogged in for something else, it hit me. My entire keyboard layout was completely hosed. Hit the up arrow, can you guess what it did? That’s right, up arrow takes a screenshot. what?. It was the only beginning of my woes. Luckily my desktop box was still connected to irc, so I asked around and was told that a workaround from total borkage is to install xorg-server without hal. So with a magical:

USE=-hal emerge -av xorg-server I was on my way typing normally. This was all brought on my wanting to use the windows key as a modifier key in gnome, but it was being reported as Super L. Eventually in the end I found where to set it as Hyper in Gnome and all is well. I hope hal fixes this soon, that was annoying… However, I did find it neat gnome had a keyboard layout for IBM->T61. Yay!