Fred James wrote,
>Anyone using the Canadian Multilingual keyboard with Linux? That is:
>Is it supported in Linux/OOo?
Possibly. If you can find a set of XKB configuration options for it, that
should unlock the multilingual features. (XKB is the part of a modern
Xwindows installation that handles the keyboard.)
If you have a recent version of X that gets its configuration information
from HAL, you might not need to do anything special...if HAL detects
what kind of keyboard you have, you're all set.
If you have an older version of X, or HAL can't figure out what kind of
keyboard you have, you'll be stuck manually setting some configuration
options in your xorg.conf file. Unforunately, how to set the XKB options
is a bit of a black art, and for all but the most generic configurations,
the options seem to change from one version of X to the next. Without
being able to actually see the keyboard, and knowing what languages
you want to type with it, I can't even begin to suggest settings.
If you want to try working it out for yourself, these are the necessary
xorg.conf lines:
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "..."
Option "XkbLayout" "..."
Option "XkbVariant" "..."
Option "XkbOptions" "..."
These options are documented (briefly) in "man kbd". They refer to entries
in the file "rules/xorg" in the XKB configuration directory (/etc/X11/xkb on
my system), which in turn refer to numerous other files in other
subdirectories of the XKB directory. It will take some study to figure out
what's going on.
Once you've got the keyboard configured, you'll need software that can
handle the keystrokes that it generates. I would be greatly surprised if
OOo can't handle both English and French input...if you want something
more exotic like Inuktitut, your guess is as good as mine as to what will
happen.
Some software won't be able to handle non-English input unless you set
the locale-related environment variables (e.g. "LANG=fr_CA" for Canadian
French)...read "man 7 locale" to learn about this. Some software can't
handle non-English input at all.
- Neil Parker
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