Tim Foster's Weblog

Regular readers will know by now, that I try to keep you guys happy - perhaps not quite to the level that the wonderful MaryMary does, but hey, I'm in engineering not marketing, and I just don't have the same contacts for obtaining free stuff as she does... (hmm, have to start working on that one)

David wrote a comment on a piece I posted a while back about Spanish Keyboards (astute readers will have noticed that post wasn't about keyboards at all, instead being a bit of a whinge on my part about fooling the most popular search engine in the world, but just to be nice, I ended it with a bit of free tech support about keyboard layouts in Solaris, which the aforementioned search engine seems to have latched on to - curse it! This post is only making things worse ! :-)). David was complaining about the complexity of setting up a Dvorak keyboard layout in Solaris. I agree with him 100% : it's not easy.

First, a confession - I don't use a Dvorak keyboard, not because I don't believe in the benefits that switching might bring, just that I can't spend a huge amount of time re-tuning my fingers to learn a new layout. People who've seen me type know that I have a somewhat erratic keyboarding style - I tend to go for the "high speed and very low accuracy" approach (my most typed key turns out to be BackSpace, I believe) The way I look at it, I'm having a whale of a time typing lots of letter sequences that don't get the attention they deserve in the English language, so I'm doing the world a good turn. (ahem). Not switching to the better techonology is sort of out of character for me : I always run the latest bleeding-edge Solaris builds I can get my hands on, I have no emotional attachment to any particular piece of software, particularly text editors or email clients, which tend to bring out the zealot in a lot of people (though it was borderline for me with the old OpenWindows mailtool, but I'm over that now, having used elm, pine, Dtmail, HotJava Views (which I loved), Mozilla, Thunderbird, Mac OSX Mail.app, Mulberry and Evolution along the way... Evo seems to be the one I've settled on for the moment)

So software, yes - I'm there, but keyboards, nope - still in the dark ages I'm afraid. The nearest I ever get to switching keyboard layouts these days is when I have to use a US keyboard that might be attached to a Sun Ray in some meeting room or other, and that's a real pain. In those cases, xmodmap comes to the rescue, and I use the following to bring some sanity :

#!/bin/sh
cat > /tmp/tim.xmodmap <<EOF
caps_lock="Control_L"
control="Control_L"
control_l="Caps_Lock"
EOF
xmodmap < tmp/tim.xmodmap
echo Swapped Caps Lock and \(left\) control key
echo made the key to the left of F1 work as Escape
rm /tmp/tim.xmodmap

Seriously, what were those Americans thinking, putting the caps-lock where control should be ? It was different back in my Solaris Localisation Testing days (wow, was that really 10 years ago !?) I'd come across new keyboard layouts all the time back then. Testing keyboard layouts was one of the things we did in the European Localisation Centre, where keyboard-types were rotated along with the usual test-cycle of installing and running Solaris in different locales. I remember that some layouts seemed to be going out of their way to make life difficult for the UNIX user (I mean, putting the '/' character on the "Shift-7" position ? Xmodmap came to the rescue there, whenever we needed to do stuff on the command line)

Thing is though, I'm not sure xmodmap is a good thing to use to switch entire keyboard layouts : remapping the odd key here and there is fair enough, but changing all of them ? Ouch. Jamie Zawinski agrees with me it seems, he says :

Although this may seem like a simple issue it is in fact one of the most complicated/convoluted things about X Windows - "If you're thinking that this is all senselessly complicated... you're` right" - Jamie Zawinski, author of xkeycaps. (quote source)

So, xmodmap isn't making things very much easier. I'm not sure things have got a whole lot better since, to be honest. I freely admit to not completely understanding the new Xorg keyboard layout stuff but I'm starting to dabble. However, getting back to the point (there is one in here somewhere, struggling to get out) - here's how to swap the keyboard layout in Solaris 10.

For some reason, we're not shipping a utility that comes with the standard Xorg distribution called setxkbmap. Inside the GNOME Keyboard Indicator, which you get by right-clicking on the GNOME Panel, select "Add to panel", "Utility -> Keyboard Indicator", there's options for changing the keyboard layout. Right click on this panel application, select "Preferences" and you'll see this :

This shows the list of keyboards I'm interested in : you'll notice that each layout I have added to the list has "xkb keymap" at the end of it. It seems that the keyboard indicator applet tries to use setxkbmap to switch layouts if you've selected an xkb keymap, and uses xmodmap otherwise. Of course, since we don't bundle setxkbmap (yet?) we get the weird error dialog :

This is another example of a dialog box that doesn't really help : I've complained about these sort of things before, guess it's time to file another bug...

If you have setxkbmap, just drop it somewhere in your $PATH, and everything should be alright - the layout switcher will use it if you select an xkb layout. I've compiled a binary of setxkbmap on my laptop, so you're welcome to use it if you like. Anyway, this post was just to point out, that you can change keyboard layouts pretty easily in Solaris now with JDS/GNOME, assuming you've got setxkbmap and use the keyboard layout switcher. Messing around with xorg.conf will work as well, though that's changing the layout for all users of your machine, which may or may not be what you intended. Hope this helps ?

timf@argentum[504] digest -a md5 bin/setxkbmap
79885096b983c509ab8a896e9c520278