Comment 73 for bug 67188

spbrereton, if what you experience is in fact bug #327963, then I believe that you should set the MODEL to something mac (e.g. "macintosh_vndr/ch") and the LAYOUT to a variant not mentioning mac (e.g. "de", not "de_mac").

The reason is that the layout files for mac models simply don't mention any specific mac layout variants, as all the mac model layouts are for mac. In other words, the "macintosh_vndr/ch" file describes a layout called "de" which fits the default swiss mac layout, but no layout called "de_mac". Bug #327963 has been turned into a request to introduce the latter as an alias to the former, in order to avoid this confusion. If you want to support that, subscribe to that bug and/or mark it as affecting you as well.

The other way, using a generic MODEL with a *_mac LAYOUT does work as well, as far as the configuration files are concerned. The result is probably not optimal, though, as that configuration is intended to simulate mac-like behaviour on a non-mac keyboard. So if your keyboard was built by apple, the other approach is preferable.

Further discussion on the speific issue of mac keyboard models with mac layout variants should probably go to bug 327963 as well, as that bug is more specific, while this one here does deal with several other and probably unrelated issues as well.