Hello again Juan,
> On Oct 13, 2016, at 3:32 PM, Juan Manuel Guerrero <juan.guerr...@gmx.de>
> wrote:
>
> Hello Jerome and Eric
>
> Thank you for your comments. IMHO the issue of having a working keyboard is
> essential. DOS and its clones appear to their users as TUI thus if the
> keyboard does not allow to issue commands it makes the OS to become almost
> useless.
> An user that has to hit around ten different keys until he finds the backslash
> key only to be capable to issue a "cd" command will lost interest quite soon.
> I had to mount the virtual disk to be capable to inspect it without getting
> crazy due to the keyboard and to figure out how to fix the issue. 30 years
> ago
> I used to use MSDOS every day all day long and thus I was suprised how much
> the
> directory structure and the available drivers and files differ from old DOS.
> So trying to fix this was not so straightforward as I expected at a first
> glance.
>
> IMO this issue could be tremendously alleviated by adding to FDCONFIG.SYS and
> AUTOEXEC.BAT, as comments, those lines that are required to select a
> particular
> keyboard layout. Having the required lines at the appropriate places together
> with some docs will allow those users that are experienced with DOS already to
> fix the issue by themselfs. Please note that I am not expecting any kind of
> magic. The MSDOS installer also did never offer any kind of magic but at
> least
> it asked the user to specify some locale and deduced from this what keyboard
> specific lines to add to config.sys and autoexec.bat.
> Neitherless it should be remembered that outside the US, the US keyboard
> layout
> is almost useless because crucial keys like backslash and colon are at
> different
> places and thus not easily found frustrating the average user quite soon.
>
>
> Regards,
> Juan M. Guerrero
>
FDI (the FreeDOS Installer) was designed to be able to handle stuff like
language specific
settings. But, no-one has provided me with keyboard or codepage settings. I
have no way to
test them and will not guess. We are now very close to the 1.2 release. So,
having FDI setup
language based keyboard customizations is not likely to happen in the current
release.
However, if you provide me with the settings needed for the most likely (single
or multiple)
settings for you language, I will have FDI embed them as REM statements when
your
language is installed. Both the KEYB and MKEYB keyboard packages are installed
by default with base.
This is easily accomplished. When running FDI it automatically calls a
SETTLANG.BAT
file for specific languages. If it is not present for a specific language, it
falls back to
using the default one for English. The contents of this batch file are also
embedded
into the installed AUTOEXEC.BAT file. This file would be located in the
FDSETUP\SETUP\%LANG% directory.
So, if you create one that looks like this:
@ECHO OFF
REM LANGUAGE SPECIFIC KEYBOARD SETUP
REM FILE: FDSETUP\SETUP\GR\SETLANG.BAT
IF NOT EXIST %DOSDIR%\BIN\KEYB.EXE GOTO NoKeyb
keyb.exe ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
:NoKeyb
and place it in the appropriate directory on the floppy or usb stick it will
automatically be
included in your autoexec.bat.
Jerome
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most
engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot
_______________________________________________
Freedos-devel mailing list
Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
