Re: question on keyboard menu choice.
On Thu, Jan 21, 1999 at 04:29:01PM -0500, Kirk Reiser wrote:
> Dear Sir: I was hoping you might be able to answer a question or two,
> and help me solve a problem I am having building a special boot disk
> set.
>
> We have written a set of kernel drivers to provide speech output on
> the console. As part of these patches we build special keymaps to
> build into the kernel or load with loadkeys. We have started making a
> set of debian distribution disks with our modified kernel on them. We
> have no problem until we get to the select keyboarde choice in the
> installation menu. If we select u.s. our keyboard review functions
> are overwritten.
>
> What we have done is dump a binary keymap file and named it us.bmap to
> try to get around the problem. I assumed that the us.bmap file was
> unpacked and loaded once a person selected us keymap at the menu
> choice. Unfortunately, it just appears to clear the keymap and not
> actually load the keymap. At least I don't think so because the
> keymaps.tgz file is still intact after that point and there does not
> seem to be any sign of the keymaps being unpacked.
The program extracts the bmap to stdout, and pipes it into loadkmap.
(See the boot-floppies sources, utilites/dinstall/kbdconfig.c ).
> If we try to by pass the menu choice, things go fine until we get down
> to installing the base system. We get an unable to find kbdconf, I
> believe at the time zone prompt. The system seems to just go back to
> the menu at that point.
Oops, that's a bug in my code. If the user has skipped the kbd config
step the system should just continue, and ask again after rebooting.
I have fixed that for the next version of the boot-floppies package.
> If you could clear up exactly what goes on at the keyboard choice,
> that would be very useful. I have looked through as much
> documentation as I have found so far, and have not been able to find a
> discussion of the actual installation process. That is not to say one
> doesn't exist, I just ain't found it yet.
Well, the only doc that exists currently is the installation manual, but
it doesn't go into the technical details. I will try to explain what's
going on at the keyboard choice.
When building the boot-floppies we use the keymaps.sh script to extract
"binary keymaps" (see utilites/writemaps/* ) from some of the ASCII
keymaps provided by the kbd-data package, and we put that bmaps into
keymaps.tgz.
Let's say the user is installing Debian on an ix86 machine, and wants to
load the qwerty/us keymap. As I said above, at the keyboard choice the
program extracts the i386/qwerty/us.bmap file from keymaps.tgz to stdout,
and pipes it into loadkmap. That means it simply loads that keymap.
No *.bmap nor *.map file is written.
Also, the program writes a file /tmp/kbdconf that contains just the
string "i386/qwerty/us". That will be used later to build the default
keymap that will be loaded each time the system reboots. (At the
"Configure base system" step we copy /tmp/kbconf from the rescue floppy
to /root/kbdconf on the installed system and after the first reboot we
build the default keymap using the keymap name contained in that file).
I guess the easier way to use your braille console would be to skip the
"Configure the keyboard" step. Now that I've fixed the bug it should work
flawlessly.
I hope that helps,
--
Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
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