It would help knowing exactly what happens, so how about you type "The very quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs," and send in what it looks like in DOSBox because of the problem. You can press Ctrl-F1 to manually remap keys, but there might be an underlying problem. Also which version of Debian is it, and which version of DOSBox?

try usescancodes=false, along with disabling any foreign keyboard layout for testing

When I typed "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", I got the following input:

http://img23.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=th_ … x_122_705lo.jpg

(when I pressed "j" it resulted in a newline), and certain other letters didn't do anything when pressed.

usescancodes=false didn't help unfortunately.

Also, I was able to start the kb mapper. The interesting thing is that the mapper added the correct key when so configured, but typed the original wrong key before it.

So for example, if pressing "q" output a "7", then after I configured the mapper to output "q" when "q" is pressed, it output "7q"

I am using Debian-based "Finnix". I know it's not a very popular distro, but I have to use it because I need a minilinux distro which Finnix is.

Try removing the mapper.txt file, which seems to contain some very odd values for your system. That should reset to the normal bindings.

Where would I find the mapper.txt? (I just used apt-get to install dosbox, all defaults)

$ find / -type f -name mapper.txt -ls

No files found

Be happy then. Means you don't have a DOSBox key mapping file at all, so everything should be default.

Thanks, but that doesn't quite solve my problem. As I said, everything outside Dosbox types fine.

There is a recent thread here somewhere, with a solution for some weird keyboard problems (in Windows). Something about a 109 key layout.

Does a different distro work? Like checking what knoppix or some other
live cd does if you can install dosbox there.

I don't have another distro. Of course I could get one and try, and I'm sure some (esp. more popular distros like Ubuntu) work fine (since obviously a lot of linux people use dosbox), but I need it working for *this* distro. 😀

It could well be distro-specific issue like some wierd keyboard config that doesn't manifest itself until you are in dosbox, or it could be incompatibility between dosbox and my particular distro. I'm not sure. I was just wondering if anyone heard of such a problem before