[Sugar-devel] XO-1 keyboard issues, partial setxkbmap workaround

[Martin Dengler]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 04:26:17AM +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> [olpc set /etc/sysconfig/keyboard from OFW's data and had no UI for
> keyboard configuration]

We could just get rid of the keyboard configure GUI and have people
edit the file still (and automatically maintain it as you suggest).
The range of choices available in the config file is huge, and I'm not
sure what it really adds to give people a very limited UI.

> In the long term, I believe Sugar should have its own keyboard
> configuration system, based on libxkb (or maybe libxklavier), and
> enable whatever keyboard(s) that is/are chosen by the user during
> startup. I believe Martin has been working on a control-panel item to
> make this work, and I would be glad to help with this.

Please help. All the code's at
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar/repos/mtd-sugar/commits/a8b0f026f21b4789b8c250764cb962eb06389189
and forks are welcome :).  I suppose the one advantage is we won't be
worse than GNOME if we just merge it as-is, but the code's
off-the-cuff and the UI has been "designed" by me so I don't think
we'll want to do that.

> As Martin points out, [writing our own X and console keyboard config
> system] is going to be a pain, since there is virtually no way
> (AFAIK) to manipulate/query xkb stuff using Python - but this
> feature needs to be added.

When I said "it is going to be a pain" I should've said "it would be a
sign of insanity" :) to create our own X and console keyboard
configuration system.  wish there was something "upstream" to crib
from at least.  Perhaps KDE has something?  I was quite surprised to
find absolutely nothing but rhpl's hardcoded list[1].

> Thanks,
> Sayamindu

Martin

1. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=490311

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