Comment 5 for bug 328980

Starting with Jaunty, error messages from xkbcomp end up in ~/.xsession-errors where they can be inspected by the technically inclined user.

This is probably due to the following change in gnome-settings-daemon:
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/?id=015e92a82c6bd19b4d3fcbcbe6ebf950790aba24
This changeset might proove difficult to backport to intrepid, though, because it builds on the following one:
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/?id=3be2d805d369f0812882e18792e51cb1bd8bf1c5
So either both would need to be backported, or the second argument of daemon(3) should be changed to 1 to give similar behaviour. All assuming that you want to backport this kind of usability fix in the first place.

For the not so technically inclined user, finding the error message is probably still rather difficult. As an alternative, I'd suggest changing the error dialog generated by the activation_error function in plugins/keyboard/gsd-keyboard-xkb.c of the gnome-settings-daemon sources. That error message already tells users to include some information if they wish to file a bug, namely the result of "xprop -root | grep XKB" and the result of "gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd". In my opinion, it would make a lot of sense to ask them for the contents of ~/.xsession-errors as well. Will the gnome-settings-daemon admins from ubuntu tale it from here, or should I file a separate bug for the change of this error message? Do you need a patch?