[syslinux] Including keyboard mappings (Was: Very last call for Syslinux 4.02)

[Dag Wieers]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2010, Dag Wieers wrote:

As promised, an update...

> On Tue, 20 Jul 2010, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>> >  BTW Did the below issue ever got fixed:
>> > 
>> >       http://syslinux.zytor.com/archives/2006-March/006720.html
>> > 
>> >  Because it prevented us in the past from converting on-the-fly.
>>
>>  The script was updated in 2009, so I *hope* that was fixed.
>
> Ok, I read your write-up too, I will test this later this week. Holiday 
> coming up ;-)

The keytab-lilo.pl script still has problems, the generated map is not 
that bad, but certain keys cannot be formed, the most important ones are 
the dot (.) and the at sign (@) (both may be used for kernel commandline 
options)

We created a specific Belgian map that also includes some other keys (eg 
pipe, hash, tilde) mapped to different scan-codes (since we don't have 
alt-gr support). keytab-lilo.pl will never be able to produce those from 
the kmap files.

So I still think it makes sense to distribute all (custom/improved) .ktl 
files with syslinux.

I'll contact the systemrescuecd author to see how he created his .ktl 
files and whether I can include those in my RPM package. It's very useful 
to have them picked up by projects that create ISO images. In our case we
automatically create a syslinux.cfg part that includes:

     ### KEYBOARD MENU
     menu begin keyboard
         menu title Change Keyboard

     label -
         menu label ..
         menu exit

     label be
         menu label BE keyboard (be)
         kernel kbdmap.c32
         append /syslinux/maps/be.kt

     ...

So people simply can type "be" from the commandline or select their 
keyboard from the menu.

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]