DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: More keyboard support
I really love Damn Small Linux. Damn! It's a really small linux I can carry on my wallet! I use DSL for my everyday work, and with a little tweaking I was able to install and use Mozilla 1.6 and OpenOffice.org 1.1 on a partition of 700 MB in my HD, with a little over 140 MB free and access to everything except... my keyboard.
I'm from Mexico, and in Mexico we use two different kind of keyboards: Spanish (es) and LatinAmerican (la). I can't figure how I can use those keyboard types either on the console nor on X Window.
I can make the ñ to work, but i don't haveany accented characters, because I can't make the deadkeys to work. I even tried to install the locales and the Debian Localization Project for Spanish, using tasksel (yes, I know how to use basic apt-get), and kbdconfig, even editing XFConfig directly, but they don't work.
So, my suggestions are:
1) somebody can wrote please a how-to that we, regular former Windows users that don't have enough experience in Linux, can use to activate our keys?
2) Somebody can add that support to DSL, even if it means we will have to run an script like the one used to install Mozilla-Firebird?
3) Somebody can help me?
I really don't want to get back to Windows just to do my everyday work...
Try this: From the menu, select WindowManagers then exit, at the system prompt type loadkeys es then re-start X by typing startx If this works for you then add that command to your .bash_profile
It didn't work. Everytime I use Loadkeys or modify XF86Config I get acess to "ñ", but I lost access to my deadkeys (I need a lot of acented characters, because I write in Spanish) AND I lost access to my "Special" characters, such as 2 & # | and \. I need the Alt-GR key, that is mapped on the phisical right Alt key, to accesss those characters, buy when I use loadkeys, I can't use it. It is not mapped. And I can't remap it, the software don't allows me to do it.
As a result, the accents are typed as 'a, 'e, 'i, 'o, and 'u instead of á, é, í, ó, and ú. For me, this is a serious issue. I need to use accented characters but I can't type them.
Any ideas?
John?
If try to boot from CD and run live from CD by using the knoppix lang=es does that work?
Just a note here. I had heard that Lindows.com has a spanish live cd out.
Maybe that is what you need. That OS takes a lot of memory and cpu power to run, according to Lindows. One of the main advantages of Damn Small is it's ability to run on slower processors (I'm using 200 mmx now) and, if you copy the /knoppix directory to the hard drive, (only 50 mb) you can run off that, with a boot floppy made with:
#dd if=cdrom/knoppix/boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k
I might add here that even though my install of DSL is running off the /knoppix
folder on the hard drive, in /dev/hda1, Damn Small refers to it as "cdrom", because that's what we started with 
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Also, SuSE is supposed to have a live CD, and they support a bunch of keyboards also. Damn Small really ought to see if they can include Spanish keyboards, however. Might sell more CD's!
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