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xkeyboard-config: last developments

Sergey Udaltsov — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:26:05 +0000

I was not blogging here for a while. But the project is still live.

The major event for all of us is going to be GNOME 3 release. There was a lot of changes in the keyboard configuration GUI (now it is search-based, wow!). There was a mockup of what the Regional/Language configuration could look like – and GNOME is very close to it. In order to facilitate that change, some fixes in xk-c would have to be done. Most important, the layout/variant descriptions have to be changed.

In GNOME2, the full variant description was composed of the layout description (usually country name) and the variant description itself. For example, “USA – International”. That schema does not allow creating variants like “Engish (US)”.

Now, the descriptions for variants are full and self-contained. That allows putting there any lines, for example “English (US)”. That is a better approach – but it requires someone to take the latest base.xml.in, walk through it and fix the descriptions. to make them user-friendly If this is done before GNOME3 release – I’ll try to make extra (out of schedule) release of xkeyboard-config. Volunteers, anyone?

PS Last couple of days I got another set of traditional enjoyment, related to Crimean Tartar variant. Here and here. The guy does not get something important…

Keyboard -> Region configuration, GNOME3 style

Sergey Udaltsov — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 21:42:33 +0000

Bastien did a really great job adopting the kbd configuration panel for the GNOME3 g-c-c style. Thank you, hadess! Even though the decision to drop the model is still questionable for me (discussing in d-d-l), overall it looks more consistent with other g-c-c panels than 2 days ago. Also, a number of bugs related to the keyboard rendering are closed (again, my gratitude to Bastien for filing them).

The future challenge for me is to implement “search” for layouts…

Keyboard is not configured in GNOME, in some cases

Sergey Udaltsov — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:23:19 +0000

In case your GNOME keyboard configuration is not working at session startup, and you start GNOME session using gdm autologin or startx from console (like in this bug), it was admitted (by Daniel Stone) it is an issue with X server (will be tracked here). Thank for clarification, Daniel (and for enabling my fd.o account as well BTW)!

Languages, countries

Sergey Udaltsov — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:30:45 +0000

For some while, I was being asked why layouts are organized on per country basis. Now, it is time to stop these discussions. I made a large commit to xkeyboard-config, putting loads of ISO (639-2/3166) codes into base.xml.in. So, when next release is out, layouts and variants can be selected by either country or language – whatever is best for the user. Now, I have a request to everyone reading this blog – could you please look at the resulting file and check whether your layouts/variants are listed with proper country/language (please keep in mind – the attributes of a variant are inherited from the enclosing layout, unless explicitly overridden).

The code in libxklavier to support this information is committed (though, some more functions are planned). The gnome-keyboard-properties capplet will benefit of it soon – the code is not in SVN yet, but at least you can look at the screenshot:

The size of the font reflects the number of layouts/variants available for the language.

Releases: rush hour

Sergey Udaltsov — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 09:29:34 +0000

Yesterday, there was a “tarballs due” date for 2.21.4. A day before I realized that wonderful layout printing code (kindly contributed by Ed Catmur, all my gratitude and respect) should be shared – it does not belong to g-c-c but should be generalized in libgnomekbd. So, yesterday night, an hour before the deadline, libgnomekbd 2.21.4.1 was released (there was libgnomekbd 2.21.4 a week ago) – with one new function in API. Now, both g-c-c and g-a in svn depend on libgnomekbd 2.21.4.1 (the last .1 is essential, hehe!). In return, they both offer layout printing functionality, isn’t it nice?