Keyboard switching

[Bernardo Innocenti]

On 11/23/07 17:32, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> On Nov 23, 2007 3:38 AM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I know how to switch the console keyboard, and how to use SCIM for IME
>> switching, but how does one switch the X keyboard? I haven't found
>> this information on the Wiki.


> I thank the people who pointed to the explanation of editing xorg.conf
> to enable switching layouts via the keyboard. The answer I was looking
> for, however, is that one can use setxkbmap from the Developer Console
> to access any layout, whether switching to it is enabled in xorg.conf
> or not.

Also note that the mechanism for configuring keyboards
has recently changed in joyride (and Update1 has part of
this work).

The new scheme is described here:
   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc-utils

Blame me if you don't like it :-)


> This is still not adequate for creating multilingual or even bilingual
> documents, which our students will need to do with great frequency.

What would you require?  I've been doing some i18n work,
but I received very little feedback so far from actual
bilingual users.

At this time, I believe we're *not* planning a GUI to let the
user easily customize the keyboard layout and add multiple
keyboards.

We are also concerned that some kids could effectively make
the laptop unusable by setting some fancy keyboard, so for
now we keep the keyboard configuration away from the user's
home directory and don't document how to override it in the
user's home.

To make things like this safe, maybe we should have a
"reset to defaults" cheat code such as keeping one key
pressed while the system is starting up.

It would be quite easy to implement: just remove the
~olpc/.olpc-configured file so that olpc-configure will
run again.

Thoughts?

-- 
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 |___|   Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
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