Keyboard layout issues

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hi all,
For the past few days have been looking at the various keyboard
related issues, especially the following

http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6973: (Production problem: Haiti keyboard
doesn't match keyboard mappings)
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6945: (MFG Problem: Ethiopian keyboards
don't provide English characters)
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5996 (Mongolian, Devanagari
keyboard/language testing)

and I think I have managed to find solutions for all of the above.

For issue #6973 (Haiti keyboard), Arjun had already found the source
of the problem - a typo in the ca symbols file in the xkeyboard-config
package. I have attached a patch to the ticket
(http://dev.laptop.org/attachment/ticket/6973/6973.patch).

Issue #6945 (Ethiopean keyboard) confused me significantly, and in the
end, the cause of the issue was found to be a GTK Input Module
(Amharic ET+) which was getting loaded due to the locale being set to
am_ET.UTF-8. This essentially overrode the XKB settings that we have.
This can happen for a few other locales as well (eg: Thai), and I have
added a small one liner patch to the olpc-session file (a part of
olpc-utils) which should take care of the issue
(http://dev.laptop.org/attachment/ticket/6945/6945.patch).

Issue 5996 (Mongolian/Devanagari keyboard) is pretty straight forward.
The testing was apparently done on build 656, which does not have the
updated symbol files. Build 703 works fine for me. Are we planning to
deploy build 656 in Mongolia in the near future ? If we are not, I
think that the ticket can be safely closed as "Obsolete" or "Invalid".



Testing the keyboard layouts
=========================

I ran into some problems initially, since I was not familiar with how
to set the manufacturing data. I have a B4 with me currently, which
had only the LA tag, and none of the K* tags. I added the K* tags with
the add-tag command from the OFW prompt, and when I needed to change
the tags, I used to change-tag command (in some cases, where the
values associated with the tags had different lengths, I had to use
$delete-tag and then add-tag again).

After the tags had been changed, I did a clean install of the os image
via copy-nand.

Example set up for testing Mongolian keyboard layout (relevant data is
available at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mfg-data)

At the OFW prompt

add-tag KM olpc
<machine reboots>
add-tag KL us,mn
<machine reboots>
add-tag KV olpc2,olpc
<machine reboots>
add-tag LO mn_MN.UTF-8
<machine reboots>
copy-nand u:\os703.img
<OS image is installed into the flash>
boot
<machine boots into Linux>

Once the Sugar setup screen comes up, verify if the initial inputs are
in basic Latin (following the QWERTY layout). If the basic Latin is
OK, press the layout toggle key (the key to the right of the "up"
arrow key), and verify that the keypresses now generate Mongolian
(Cyrillic??) characters (as per
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Mongolian_Keyboard).




Comments on the patches are welcome :-).
Thanks,
Sayamindu



-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]