Hello All,
Jim has been very busy over the last couple weeks and I have not heard back
from him as of yet.
His decisions on these matters are not yet known. However, I fully understand
the pain involved
with trying to use a command line that is mapped to a a language other than the
one being used.
Although I am in the US, I have experienced this with remote terminals and
linux distributions
that are configured for languages other than English.
So, I have implemented the following for the installer. I know it is not a
perfect solution for all
users. But, I think it solves most of the issues and best conforms to the
(overall) easy and
simplified installation process. Jim may or may not want the installer to
always prompt for
keyboard layout selection. I have no way of knowing and this may change once I
hear from him.
If the user is in normal mode and English is the language, it will not prompt
for keymap
settings and assume default of a US English.
If the user is in advanced mode or picks a non-English language, it will prompt
with a
short list of 7 keymaps (US, UK, ES, FR, DE, DE-Alternate and NL). These mostly
match the current language selections available for the installer. The
installer also
preselects one of these keymaps based on the users language. For example, if
they
are using German, it will preselect a German keyboard. The user is able to
change this
selection or choose the “More Keyboard Options…” (MKO). The MKO contains the
same 7 keyboard selections (built-in) and 3 additional ones (Latin, Swiss
French and
Swiss German) at present. MKO is a scrollable dynamic list created at release
time
and has no set limit to the number of choices that can be provided. However, I
will
not be creating any additional keyboard options. There is no way for me to test
them.
This is where all of you come into this. If you provide me with the complete
data for an additional
keymap I will have the installer add it to the MKO section. Without any
community provided
submissions, there will only be 10 keyboard layout choices provided.
These are the requirements:
Any comments that are to be included with the release must start with a ;
(semi-colon).
Lines that are not Title Translations, Command Lines or Comments will be
automatically
stripped out during their concatenation in the release build process.
All major language translations are required. (English, Spanish, German,
French, Dutch
and Esperanto) If a translation is missing, it will be EXCLUDED from that
language as
an option.
The CMD field is the exact DOS command that will be embedded in the
AUTOEXEC.BAT
file. Technically, you could have multiple CMD entries for multiple lines. But,
you
probably should avoid doing that.
KEYB, KEYB_LAY and MKEYB packages are all installed with FreeDOS 1.2 BASE.
So, mkeyb.exe, key.exe, xkeyb.exe and others are available to be used. You
should test
your command line under FreeDOS 1.2 Preview 23 (or soon later version) BASE
Only
installation to ensure it functions properly.
Deadline for inclusion in FreeDOS 1.2-RC1 is 10/29/2016
Deadline for inclusion in FreeDOS 1.2 (Final) is 11/11/2016
Here is the Swiss German Keyboard layout definition file as an example.
[begin file SWISS-GR.KYB]
; Optional Swiss German Keyboard Layout Definition
; by Jerome Shidel
EN=Swiss German
ES=Suizo Alemán
DE=Schweizerdeutsch
FR=Suisse allemand
NL=Zwitserduits
EO=svislando germana
CMD=mkeyb.exe SV
[end of file]
Thanks,
Jerome
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