Old World (Europe) Powerbook G# Swiss-German Keyboard.

[Alexander Holst]

Hi Jon,

Am Montag, 19.05.03, um 23:45 Uhr (Europe/Berlin) schrieb  
yellowdog-general-request@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com:

> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:21:55 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Jon Kofal <jonkofal@yahoo.com>
> Subject: Old World (Europe) Powerbook G# Swiss-German Keyboard.
> To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> Reply-To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
>
> Has anyone instructions on how to get this keyboard working in BOTH
> X-Windows and CHaracter mode?
>
> I've run both redhat-config-keyboard and the packaged XWindows keyboard
> configuration and get good results (except @ key) in X-Windows, but the
> Character mode is a total mess.

I had a similar problem with a plain German keyboard, when typing at a  
console. It wasn't the keyboard layout that was faulty, it was the way  
the systemfont is set at the boot sequence. In order to get the desired  
characters, at a console, I had to enter setfont -m 8859-15 for the  
Umlauts to appear correctly. You might want to try that. After that,  
the keyboard mapping is correct for my German Latin1 nodeadkeys Layout.

If this works for you and you want to permanently have this by default,  
you have to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit. The appropriate part is:

  # Load system font
  if [ -x /sbin/setsysfont ]; then
     [ -f /etc/sysconfig/i18n ] && . /etc/sysconfig/i18n
     for i in 2 3 4 5 6; do
       > /dev/tty$i
     done
     case "$LANG" in
       *.utf8*|*.UTF-8*)
         action $"Setting default font ($SYSFONT): " /bin/unicode_start  
$SYSFONT
         ;;
       *)
         action $"Setting default font ($SYSFONT): " /sbin/setsysfont
         ;;
     esac
  fi
fi

Or take a look at /sbin/setsysfont, the script called by rc.sysinit, it  
actually sets the font via the setfont command (consolechars is not  
installed with YDL 3.0). In both places, the "-m 8859-15" switch will  
never be added to the setfont command, so I always have to do it by  
hand or have a "fix" in the mentioned places, which in turn will screw  
things up when you change the default keyboard or language.

My /etc/sysconfig/i18n looks as follows:

LANG="de_DE.iso885915@euro"
SUPPORTED="en_US.iso88591:en_US:en:de_DE.iso885915@euro:de_DE:de_DE.iso8 
85915:de"
SYSFONT="lat0-sun16"
SYSFONTACM="iso15"

The SYSFONTACM value reads iso15, but gets never translated to "-m  
8859-15" required for the setfont command.

> Perhaps just a concise general Linux Keyboard support would help.

Hope this gets you on the road ;)

Greetings,
Alex


Alexander Holst
Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences
<holst@fh-pforzheim.de>
ph: +49 [0]7231 28-6837
fx: +49 [0]7231 28-6040