Re: [RFC] Different keyborad layouts

[Vesa Jääskeläinen]

Robert Millan wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 09:26:58PM +0300, Vesa Jääskeläinen wrote:
>> Remember that in some keyboard you need to press combos in order to
>> generate some character. Like in Finnish keyboard you press alt-gr + e
>> in order to generate euro sign (or alt-gr + 5). Also there are
>> multi-keypress sequences like in order to make '^' this sign you have to
>> press ctrl + '^' button and when released then press space. If you
>> happen to press in example 'a' after ctrl + '^' key you get 'â'. And I
>> do not think this is the only keyboard with this feature. Also there is
>> those dec input sequences like alt+number sequence. In example alt
>> (pressed) + '6', '5' you get 'A'.
> 
> Do we really want to support all keys (and therefore all minor keyboard
> variants) out there, or just those needed for metacharacters like '/' and
> such?

Probably not. But anyway... I would like simple combos to be handled
nicely. Like shift+7 (forward slash). And then if you have some weird
keyboard you should be able to generate unicode key based on some easy
way and to handle capslock + shift to make lowercase and uppercase
characters.

>> I do not like the idea of using variable for this as it will most likely
>> require loading of keymap definition form disk. So I would prefer something:
>>
>> insmod keymap
>> keymap /boot/grub/keyboard/fi
> 
> Seems fine to me.  Note, however, that with the information currently exported
> by e.g. at_keyboard.c it isn't possible to tell when special combinations like
> "alt-gr + 5" were pressed.

We need to uniform keyboard handling in way that USB and AT and bios
keyboards get handled in same path.

Now the next issue is if we have like two usb keyboards. How it should
work in grub's case is that both is listened for input.