[OLPC New Zealand] Māori Macrons & olpc keyboard

[Tom Parker]

On 24/06/13 23:43, Walter Bender wrote:
> Which build are you running? In the latest Sugar builds, there is a
> keyboard settings control panel section. We could probably backport it
> to your build if it is reasonably recent.

I don't know which build they are running. I've tried

One Education OS 1.2 (build au889) with Sugar 0.94.1
13.2.0 for XO-4 (build 10) with Sugar 0.98.7
XO-system 1a for XO-4 (build 34) with Sugar 0.98.7

and none of them have a keyboard settings thing.

I don't think a keyboard settings control panel is immediately necessary 
as the laptops will remain in Maori. It would be good in a future 
release if we could say "after reflashing, set your language and 
keyboard to maori" without having to resort to customizations.

> Meanwhile, we may have to make a new X keyboard symbols file for you
> that does the right thing. Not impossible to get upstreamed.

I wasn't really able understand the /usr/share/X11/xkb directory, but 
using xkbcomp to retrieve the current config, modify it and return it to 
the X server does the trick.

Is there a document that describes the "right" way to add a keyboard and 
select it? Using xkbcomp in a startup script might work but is obviously 
a hack. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creating_A_New_Keyboard_Layout seems 
to cover this but appears to be out of date.

Until we get feedback from the actual users about what they want their 
keyboards to do, I think it's best to customize the build they have 
rather than upstream something and get a new build.