Switching between Arabic and French

[Ralph A. Mack]

Hello all,

It appears I've finally figured this out. The following command, from an
olpc command window, seems to get me what I want (with Right Alt as the
group toggle key):

  setxkbmap -display :0 fr,ara -option grp:toggle

(Of course, in the real world, these would be reversed :-))

What fooled me was that I was using Write as a test application. With
the above settings, I get precisely what I would expect in Chat - French
on the left, toggle, then Arabic on the right. In Write, when I switched
to Arabic, I just got pseudo-European gibberish on the right of the text
(not the margin) filling in leftward, :) but this was with a Ship.2-659
build, which might be quite venerable by now - not sure. 

With this in mind, it looks like it might be time to switch from Ship.2
to Joyride and update frequently, which means I will need to be able to
pull down new builds more reliably than I can right now for some reason
- but that's a whole different subject, so I'll post separately on it.

One other comment, just a nit really: it surprised me that the mapping
of <I216> to [ISO_Next_Group, ISO_Prev_Group] was put into each of the
main language files rather than once in the option file and then
reflected in the rules as needed. This wasn't true for group mappings on
my Ubuntu Linux box. Instead, based on what I see there, I'd expect an
alias definition in whatever the olpc uses in keycodes (evdev?) and then
its use in symbols/group. 

Was this inherited from upstream? If not, I'd be interested to learn the
rationale for the choice. I'm only a couple of days into this stuff, and
the more I read of it, the more I'm certain that there's a lot more
underneath that I missed. When I see a pattern, I usually learn the most
from its exceptions :-)

Gxis,
Lupestro