Re: Help with collecting keyboard data

[Rui Tiago Cação Matos <tiagomatos gmail com>]

Hello Chris,

On 4 January 2013 16:01, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress gmail com> wrote:
> OLPC (and Sugar Labs) get into the keyboard creation business with
> some regularity.  I see a few "olpc" keyboards on your list, but for a
> more complete listing see:
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Keyboard_layouts
>
> There may be some layouts for languages you don't have already (albeit
> for OLPC keyboard configs).
>
> You are only looking for XKB layouts?

We are not particularly looking for more layouts. The current X server
uses the xkeyboard-config[1] database (which already has more stuff
than I'd like) and so that's what GNOME uses. Of course, if there are
layouts missing in there we should add them and if some that are there
currently have bugs they should be fixed.

[1] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xkeyboard-config

I don't know much about OLPC at a technical level so I don't know
which layouts database it uses. But, if it uses a modern X server it's
also probably using xkeyboard-config and that would be why some of the
layouts there are labeled as "OLPC".

What we are looking for is to collect data that allows us to preset a
good default keyboard layout or input method that works for most
people when installing GNOME in a given language/country.

> With the touchscreen version of the XO laptop (XO-4) due to be
> announced any day now (at CES, I think) there is a lot of effort going
> into Maliit on-screen keyboard layouts
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Garycmartin/Maliit_Layouts
>
> With two million XO laptops out there, and given that the OLPC OS is
> running the Sugar UI on a GNOME/Fedora stack and offering a GNOME
> desktop as a dual-boot option, you'll have to make your own calls
> about how important they are to include, but you might want to touch
> base with the OLPC devs via

On-Screen keyboards like Maliit may use totally different keyboard
data depending on how they work. Maliit in particular has been
discussed in the past for GNOME but we ended up not using it for
technical reasons.

Are these new XO laptops going to ship the full GNOME desktop, i.e.
including gnome-shell?

> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>
> if there are any questions, if only because by the nature of the OLPC
> / Sugar Labs mission, we deal with some "exotic" language options and
> collaborate with a lot of language communities just starting to "plant
> their flag" on Linux (e.g. new locales, etc.).

Sure, that makes sense. There are certainly opportunities for
collaboration here.

Rui