More keyboard support
Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: More keyboard support
started by: maybrick
Posted by maybrick on Jan. 29 2004,22:35
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...
Posted by roberts on Jan. 30 2004,01:34
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
Posted by maybrick on Jan. 30 2004,21:39
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?
Posted by roberts on Jan. 30 2004,23:34
If try to boot from CD and run live from CD by using the knoppix lang=es does that work?
Posted by Rapidweather on Jan. 31 2004,22:07
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
---
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!
Posted by guido on Feb. 01 2004,00:47
Question...Do you know why this Lindows liftime member like to use DSL ?
Simple ! I can run DSL on every machine and for Lindows i must use my "power" PC
So don't advise to use Lindows to replace with Lindows.
But they have indeed a spanisch version.
Regards ,
Guido
P.S. AND .... in DSL i can try and test ...in Lindows not.
Posted by maybrick on Feb. 03 2004,03:40
I know Lindows has a spanish version. Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, Debian and even Knoppix has spanish versions, too. That's OK... except for the fact that I neither need, nor want to use, such bloated versions for my everyday work. Let's just read the facts: Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE and Debian need to be installed into my hard drive. I don't have a lot of spare space in my disk. I mostly work on a laptop with 3 gigabytes of space, and i assigned 650 MB for my Linux partition, 128 MB for swap, and the rest as data. I use a 350 MB IBM Microdrive for my current work, and I take the microdrive and DSL to everywhere I go, in the same box (because the bootable business card fits in the same space). So if I install a complete Linux enviroment, I won't have any left space for my work. So I need a small version of Linux.
There is a mini-cd with a stripped down version of knoppix, but it is still too big for me: after it expands, I have about 1.5 GB of free space, and my office programs will take at least 500 MB. My data won't fit in less that 1.5 gigs, and I need it complete.
So, when I heard of Damn Small Linux, and checked the fact that it taked 250 MB in my hard drive once installed, and with the addition of Mozilla and OpenOffice.org 1.1 my 650 MB partition still had a little space (if i move my e-mail into a USB disk, thing that I've for months for security reasons), then I could have more space available for my data.
It is working good, and it's pretty stable... and cheap, because I don't have money for upgrading my hard drive. (By the way, if you have an spare 5 or 6 GB HD for a laptop, and want to sell it for cheap, I'll buy it!).
The only problem is that I can't type well and fast in Spanish.
I'm primary a writer, and since a few months I've taking jobs as a kind of translator for scientists: the wrote their texts as they know, I translate it to plain Spanish, so my client can resell it to book editors, magazines, diaries, etc. I get my money when the book or article is sold, because science research is not as profitable as you may think. This means I need to write a lot, and write fast, and write in Spanish. So my productivity is now a fifth of what it used to be sinse my original 10 GB hard drive died, taking with him my previous Lycoris installation and just 10 MB of data that I didn't backup that week.
To me, the only thing I need to make DamnSmall Linux perfect is the support for the spanish (or even latinamerican) keyboard, and I know how I can make it work.
I've tried everything I know, including the knoppix lang=es line when I boot from CD, but it does not work.
I don't have fancy hardware (the most problematic piece of junk in my laptop is the modem, and I connect to the internet via cablemodem, so I'm not really worried about it), so I just need to make my keyboard to work and I'll be a happy man... happier if I get a bigger hard drive.
I don't want to run any live-cd distro because I need to make my backups in my laptop's internal burner.
So, expressed all this, does anyone have any idea of what do I need to do to have access to my accents? Any one? John, are you reading this?