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Advice for develop multiple keymap support

2013-03-15
2014-11-28
  • David Moreno

    David Moreno - 2013-03-15

    Hi,

    Im starting to work on adding multiple keymap support on libguac-client-rdp. Just now its fixed to a hardcoded en_us keymap.

    First of all, let me know if somebody is already working on this, and how can I help if such effort exists.

    If nobody is working on it I want to do it ASAP.

    My main question is if the keymap information should be coded as it is right now on the en_us keymap, as a compilable C file, or it should be better to create external files.

    I'm for external files, as it allows easily to create new keymaps as needed, and will not add size to the library file. It adds about 6kb according to my fast-and-dirty calculations for each keymap.

    As initial data we can use any of the existing data files, using the same format or another one.

    To my mind comes kbd, installed on almost every linux distro. On fedora its at /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/. It is licensed GPLv2+, so I guess is a no go (as the lib is LGPL), but just adding the support to read that files, and not including them, is enough to make it work, honouring the licenses (IANAL).

    There is the problem of making this work on other systems, but maybe we can find a redistributable pack of keymaps, or another way to make it work on windows… although make a different parser per OS looks ugly.

    Other projects that use keymaps use other format, for example qemu ( /usr/share/qemu/keymaps/ ) and  rdesktop (/usr/share/rdesktop/keymaps/) use the same format.

    Please let me know you thoughts.

    Regards,
    David.

     
  • vitor

    vitor - 2014-10-29

    Hi David,

    Any progress on this?

    Regards,

     
  • admkazuya

    admkazuya - 2014-11-28

    Hi, David

    I can help debugging of Japanese keyboard format.
    Infect, I have a hard time of for use Japanese Imput Method Editor.
    We have to use mouse at typing japanese.

    Regards.