Hello,
since so many people complain about the console (outside X) not having the dot and question mark key active, and also for me this was a pain, I have investigated a bit and developed a solution.
The file responsible for the key not being active is /etc/sysconfig/keyboard/kernel.map which maps the dot key to Shift (try it: The key probably acts as a shift key).
Maybe it is also mapped to something else, depending on what you enter in the "Input Setup" under "System Tools". But not obviously dependent, but somehow weird.
If you fix that kernel.map file and reboot, the key is working correctly again.
Now, everytime you use the "Input Setup" the file is overwritten by junk values.
So I simply totally removed the responsible section from the inputsetup.py application. That means:
1. Take the appended ZIP file, unzip it; it contains two files:
2. Put the kernel.map into /etc/sysconfig/keyboard.
3. cp /usr/bin/inputsetup.py /usr/bin/inputsetup.py.ORG
4. Put the inputsetup.py file from the ZIP into /usr/bin
5. Reboot.
Now the keys are OK again and the kernel.map won't automatically be modified anymore.
I am aware that this is kind of a dirty hack, but this way you can even put more modifications into kernel.map which are now persistent. They would have been overwritten as well by the inputsetup script.
If anyone comes up with a better solution (modifying inputsetup.py in a way which preserves user-defined modifications and writes its own values correctly into kernel.map) it would be even better of course.
Have fun!
daniel
