[arch-releng] /usr/bin/km, loadkeys and dumpkeys

[Dieter Plaetinck]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:17:51 -0600
Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Dieter Plaetinck
> <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
> > While figuring out http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/13374,
> > I was inspecting /usr/bin/km, it does "loadkeys" from the kbd
> > package to load the keyboard table.
> > But unfortunately it looks to me you can't just get the name of that
> > table afterwards (eg with dumpkeys), you can only get the table
> > itself from the kernel.
> >
> > I am correct or am I missing something?
> 
> Looks like that's correct
> 
> > How will we fix this, let km export an environment variable which we
> > pull in the installer?
> > Who maintains the "km" tool? it is not included in any package.
> 
> km was originally written by tpowa, but we couldn't figure out where
> to put the script - it didn't fit very well in the installer repo - so
> it's in the ISO config directory, somewhere in overlay I think.
> 
> Feel free to pull it into AIF. While it's not strictly for
> installation it's a custom utility used DURING installation, so it's
> probably useful.

Hmm.. I always liked how Gentoo (and/or sysresqcd) does it:
they do it with an initscript so you just have to pick a number before
you even login to get the keymap you want.

"aif -p interactive" is a bit hard to type in a layout you're not used
to, sure we can work around that (bash alias and whatnot) but still,
you might want to just do some console work only (or before launching
the installer): starting aif, selecting keymap and then quitting it
again seems a bit awkward. (though since recently aif has the concept
of "partial procedures" in which it exposes in an easy way a subset of
it's features: eg only set clock, only do partitioning, or we could do
only keymap setting with it, and do something like alias km='aif -p
partial-keymap'.  I guess that would be a good solution.

Dieter