New manufacturing data flags for keyboards (2nd draft).

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Oct 7, 2007, at 0:08 , Bernardo Innocenti wrote:

> Mitch Bradley wrote:
>
>> One solution would be to include a lot of keymaps in OFW and  
>> select one
>> based on the new KL tag.  However, I'm not keen on having to carry
>> around a lot of keymaps in the ROM, and extend that list from time  
>> to time.
>
> There's also a trivial, "good enough" solution to the problem: don't
> do anything.
>
> All non-US computer users like me have learned to live with it, and
> it's not as bad as it may seem to US users.  In Italian, French and
> German layouts, there are typically just a few misplaced keys you
> need to care about... and those you don't remember are easy to find
> by trial and error.
>
> Really, if it's just for system recovery tasks, then it's just for
> techies. And if they're technical enough to type shell and forth
> commands, they're also going to understand the issue rather than
> complain "my keys are messed up, I'm lost!".

I disagree. It's a major hassle if the keys you press do not do  
what's printed on them. Simply assuming a US layout when the machine  
can know quite well what keyboard is attached is unacceptable. It's a  
shortcoming of external keyboards that they do not communicate their  
physical layout to the host (*), but for the built-in keyboard in a  
laptop we should not have to live with this.

Yes, I learned to find the most important keys even on a German  
keyboard that the software assumed to be English. Still, I hate it  
every single time it happens. Jim's proposal means this *could* be  
solved for good. Yay!

- Bert -

(*) the OS should let you choose the layout for every keyboard newly  
attached, and then remember that setting. For some reason that I  
don't understand, no OS allows to use a German and English keyboard  
in parallel. They all can only have one keymap active at a time.