[Sugar-devel] Creating keyboard maps

[mokurai at earthtreasury.org]

On Sun, December 4, 2011 5:42 pm, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> Sugar lets you change the keyboard map via My Settings. I am in touch
> with people who are interested in building maps for Australian native
> languages.
>
> Are there any instructions on what format these files are in, and how
> they created? Are the same maps usable in GNOME? Does anything about
> this change in GNOME Shell?

Yes, there is such information. It would be excellent to bring it together
on the Sugarlabs Wiki, and it would be excellent to have somebody learn it
in detail and offer to create keyboards for all languages used in OLPC
deployments. I can show you the list of supported layouts, and we could
make a list of keyboard layouts needed. Then we would have to consult with
users of the languages about what needs to be on those layouts, and
whether there are any preferences based on, for example, existing
typewriter layouts.

Sugar uses standard X keyboards, the same as in Gnome, KDE, and all other
graphical Unix/Linux environments. The keyboard files are in ASCII, with
extended characters specified by name or by Unicode number.

Here are a starting point.

The command to change keyboards in Linux is setxkbmap.

man setxkbmap

       The setxkbmap command maps the keyboard to use the layout
determined by
       the options specified on the command line.

       An XKB keymap is constructed from a number of components which are
com‐
       piled  only  as  needed.   The  source for all of the components
can be
       found in /usr/share/X11/xkb.

in the symbols subdirectory.

Articles on creating your own keyboard layout text files have been
published in several magazines, and are available on the Internet. If you
want to pursue this after you take a look at the file format, I will dig
out some references for you.

> Thanks,
> Sridhar
>
>
> Sridhar Dhanapalan
> Engineering Manager
> One Laptop per Child Australia
> M: +61 425 239 701
> E: sridhar at laptop.org.au
> A: G.P.O. Box 731
>      Sydney, NSW 2001
> W: www.laptop.org.au
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>


-- 
Edward Mokurai
(默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر
ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks