Keyboard switching

[Bernardo Innocenti]

On 11/23/07 23:43, Edward Cherlin wrote:


>> Blame me if you don't like it :-)
> 
> So right now there is no way to modify xorg.conf, but it will be set
> correctly for one or two languages required in the target country. OK.
> I don't need it. I'll change where I discussed this in the Wiki. You
> will need to allow for countries that use three or more scripts
> routinely, for students of history, religion, and other subjects
> involving historical source documents, and especially for students of
> languages.

The XKB configuration allows for any number of layouts to
be used at the same time.

The defaults from the manufacturing data usually specify only
one, or two for non-latin keyboards.


> I'm multilingual. Bilingual is good, but not sufficient. Most people
> seem to think that one local language plus English is sufficient, but
> in most countries it isn't. For language students, the situation is
> worse yet.
>
> Rwanda needs at least Kinyarwanda, French, and English (all Latin
> alphabet, so all manageable from one international keyboard layout.)

The number of keyboard layouts does not necessarily have to match
the number of languages the children speak.  A US-intl keyboard
is good enough to type in many latin languages.

The best thing we can do is provide good language and keyboard
defaults for each Laptop customization we produce (generally,
each different keyboard layout is a different SKU).


> India isn't looking like a candidate for the laptop, but it has more
> than 20 official languages in 10 different writing systems.

Some people were working on improving support for Marathi,
Devangari, and other scripts.  Manusheel knows better.

> [...other examples...]

Yes, I believe we're doing our best to support as many
languages, scripts and keyboard layouts as possible.

As you note, it's really a lot of work.  So we're giving
priority to those who are most likely to get laptops soon.
Any help would be appreciated.


> You can't prevent it. I and a lot of people are going to change
> keyboards in the Developer Console if you don't give us a GUI method,
> and some of us are going to make our own layouts. Security through
> obscurity is busted. Document the proper methods for doing it, and how
> to fix it when it goes wrong. In any event, there has to be a way to
> restore a broken installation no matter what the cause.

I can only document how to customize keyboard layouts: create
a file in /home/olpc/.kbd and put the XKB_{MODEL,LAYOUT,VARIANT}
you like there.  For Ethiopic:

  XKB_MODEL=olpc
  XKB_LAYOUT=us,et
  XKB_VARIANT=olpc2,olpc

Problem is, if you happen to only configure "et" without "us",
you won't be able to type anything in the terminale and I
don't know what to suggest to recover the laptop.

It will be rather tricky when security is enabled.

Before we suggest thousands of users to do it, we clearly
need a good way to unbrick the laptops in case of mistakes.


>> It would be quite easy to implement: just remove the
>> ~olpc/.olpc-configured file so that olpc-configure will
>> run again.
> 
> Rename, don't delete. People need all the pieces of the puzzle when debugging.

You can safely delete it: it's an empty flag file.
In recent versions of olpc-configure, it containts a
version number.


> We would probably do better to design a way of recovering from the
> full range of possible faults, not just one at a time.

Reflashing the laptop is the ultimate recovery method, but
you also loose the user data :-(


> Yes. I recommend that everyone involved in localization read the
> introductory material in The Unicode Standard, version 5.0, and glance
> through the charts, and browse at Ethnologue for information on
> numbers of speakers of languages by country. Just so you know what
> there is to know when you need it.
> 
> http://www.unicode.org/
> http://www.ethnologue.org/
> 
> You don't need to know all of this, but you need to know it exists.
> Then ask people who know more than that about their own country's
> requirements whenever the occasion arises. I can introduce you to some
> of them.

I'm sorry, I may have given you the impression that I'm an i18n
engineer, but I'm not.   I barely speak English and Italian and
I don't even know all of the greek alphabet :-)

I just happen to work in some of the platform areas where i18n
has to be configured (X11, initscripts, olpc-utils...).
So I've been mostly acting as a hub, collecting changes from
several different people and in some cases dispatching it to
our upstreams.

As I said above, any contribution welcome!

-- 
 \___/
 |___|   Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \___\  One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/