Brian Cameron wrote: > Brian: > > > The IIIMF applet is already in OpenSolaris and though it doesn't > > appear to link xklavier, it's keyboard layout tab says: > > > > "Use autodetect (does not work in remote environment)" > > > > The keyboard switcher applet uses xmodmap if libxklavier is not > available, so I would bet it is building with this configuration.
I believe that IIIMF uses the XKB Extension, but it is only run when the user's locale supports switching (e.g. it's not run with using C or iso8859-15), but it is if the user runs a UTF-8 based locale. The reason for the inability to auto-detect is more down to access to the keyboard hardware which provides it's layout (at least with USB), but even at that I'm sure there are problems - e.g. on Macbooks the layout is very different to most PC type keyboards, even though it's meant to be an ISO standard, which doesn't appear to be supported all that well even in XKB. > > The xmodmap interfaces are also not standard across different > Xservers, so you can have the same sorts of problems using it > in this mode as with using libxklavier. Yes, xmodmap is a problem, and it's the no. 1 reason that we don't use it on Solaris since by default on Sparc systems using Xsun the preferred and more consistent XKB extension is off by default. I think if we had Xsun enable XKB by default we could start using the existing GNOME keyboard applets and associated code/libs if we wish. > >> Does iiim also rely on private X APIs? What is the relationship >> between IIIM and KeyboardLayoutSwitcher applet? Would >> KeyboardLayoutSwitcher provide redundant functionality which is already >> provided by IIIM? I think a keyboard switcher would be very useful, >> (the fact that we got so many trouble calls on odd combinations of >> keyboards and Xservers tells me that many people were using it!) There does appear to be overlap, but I'll be honest in admitting I've not had much need for either in the past, but now using my MacBook as my main platform I'm finding more keyboard issues due to Mac's layout being so different and not as well supported in Xorg's XKB mappings as PC keyboards - so plugging in different USB keyboards results in more miss-mapped keys than before when using a PC style laptop. I think that this type of keyboard layout selection is not handled by IIIM which is most focused on locale layout changes. > > I'm not very familiar with IIIM. I'd bet if you asked Takao, that > he could provide some perspective here. I'm sure that the Takao and his team would be best placed to comment on this... > >> I wonder if it is possible to do this in a supportable way and provide >> an interface at least as intuitive as what Sun and Apple had years ago >> (e.g. Solaris 7): http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/805-4123/6j3tmpc73?a=view > > I suspect it would be, but there's probably not an easy, quick solution. > To do this properly, this would likely be a cross-consolidation project. > Therefore, it would likely require a high enough priority to get some > commitment from the different teams that would need to be involved. Or > perhaps the open source community will solve this problem in the > meantime. I think we have a choice - either enhance IIIM to always run and support changing of varied layouts (many of which are already described for XKB) in each locale (e.g. MacBook, PC, etc.), or port the existing GNOME stack - but I have a feeling that this also depends on HAL work for identifying the keyboards (based on observations on the patches sent to the HAL mailing list for such things). Thanks, Darren.
