N900: Proper console and X keymap customisation

[MerlijnWajer]

Right now we set a US layout for both Linux and X, so that people can at least access the useful keys: (-/,_. and so on).

We should look at proper customisation.

[dderby]

Devuan/Debian provides the xkb-data package which includes an N900 layout for X11 (/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-51) but it's quite limited.

I've been using the console and XKB layouts provided by the Arch Linux N900 port which are very complete and in my opinion, work very well under Devuan.

Console keymap: https://github.com/archlinuxarm-n900/n900-keymaps/raw/master/rx51_us.map XKB patches: https://github.com/archlinuxarm-n900/xkeyboard-config-n900-git/raw/master/

[Juesto]

How about Nokia's keymaps included in the original Maemo N900? I am not entirely sure if those can be used...

[dderby]

The X11 keymap in Leste is already pretty similar, if not identical to the one originally in Fremantle (so far I've not seen a problem in X11). Fremantle never provided console support so I've no idea what the state of that would have been.

The Arch Linux keymaps mirror the Fremantle layout but make use of the modifier keys to provide extra essential keys (Esc, Tab, |, `, <, >, ~, F keys and others). It also has a nice feature of Fn+VOLUME_DOWN and Fn+VOLUME_UP to cycle through ttys.

[MerlijnWajer]

For X, I think this problem is solved with hildon-input-method now being available. For non-X, I am not sure if this is a big deal, with IIRC someone was working on better/custom keymaps.

[pavelmachek]

I'm not sure what hildon-input-method is (is that settings/Text Input?) but better default keymap would be nice. Pressing blue-enter for tabelator is way better than using on-screen tab button.

[MerlijnWajer]

@pavelmachek package hildon-input-meta should bring in hildon-input-method and friends. It's a combination of things:

1. virtual keyboard for full keyboard and special keys
2. the software that makes the symbol/shift keys do the right thing and be sticky (just like on normal n900)
3. word completion and other stuff that I don't usually use myself
4. custom keymap creation (afaik)
5. keyboard layout switching (e.g. switch between US and CZ)

Point 2. is the one that will give you most of what you need, point 1. is what will give you the pipe symbol in the special keyboard popup. There is a little work remaining to properly monitor the keyboard slide state, so you may need to set one or two gconf keys before it works properly. It will work out of the box and properly for sure when we release the alpha.

It only works in X, not in tty.

[pavelmachek]

I used xfce4 a bit (and pmOS has the same setup), and being able to do blue-enter to get the tabelator and blue-shift-l to get the | symbol is really nice.

This is layout in use by pmOS: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/File:N900_keymap_us.jpg

(linked from https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900 )

Yes, on screen keyboard, blue-ctrl to get the symbols (etc) are nice, but this works even better.

[MerlijnWajer]

I see. For Maemo in X11, there is this: https://wiki.maemo.org/Remapping_keyboard

But that does not help with proper console keymap. I am OK with including a more featureful/custom one for use in kernel with loadkeys, but I am afraid it might mess up the virtual keyboard / hildon-input-method. @freemangordon - any comments/ideas? We could conceivably just ship a better/more advanced X11 keyboard, and if people want to debug without X, then can load/install the custom/pmos kernel keymap?

[MerlijnWajer]

Perhaps adding a pipe symbol by default to osso-xterm is also not a bad idea:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/xterm/key_labels -t list --list-type=string "[Tab,Esc,PgUp,PgDn,|]"
gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/xterm/keys -t list --list-type=string "[Tab,Escape,Page_Up,Page_Down,bar]"

[NokiaN900Question]

Hi,

is there any update about this topic? I wanted to change the hardware keyboard layout to german but it crashes as soon as I click ob „textinput“ section. (Internal Error. Programm ‚Configuration‘ closed)

From the terminal I tryed to dpkg-reconfigure xkb-data console-data keyboard-configuration locales with no success.

Cheers