kbd-chooser for DECstation machines

[Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>]

Since the time is not on our side I'll better forward this mail
so others can jump in as well.

Regards,

	Joey

----- Forwarded message from Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org> -----

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 20:57:25 +0200
From: Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>
To: Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@computer.org>
Cc: Karsten Merker <merker@debian.org>
Subject: kbd-chooser for DECstation machines

Hi Alastair,

at the Oldenburg Developers Meeting we were working on getting proper
keyboard support for DECstation back into good shape.  console-common
and console-data will receive a patch soon that will enable LK201-us
properly, and with some amount of good luck Karsten will provide
LK201-de as well.

One problem remains.  During the installation a medium priority
question (console-tools/archs) is displayed which lists all possible
keyboard types for mipsel (AT, LK, USB) but has the default set to AT.

The problem is that this question is only displayed when the user
explicitly asks the installer to display medium priority dialog boxes
as well.  On a mipsel system that doesn't have an AT keyboard
connected the user would be trapped into an AT keyboard, effectively
rendering his keyboard unusable.

The code for this default setting is in kbd-chooser.h:

#if defined(AT_KBD) && !defined(PREFERRED_KBD)
#define PREFERRED_KBD "at"
#endif

We could simply declare no preferred keyboard for the mipsel
architecture (beware, there's __mips__ for both mips and mipsel, and
__MIPSEL__ for only mipsel).  This would require the dialog to be
displayed, though, for the user to be able to select the keyboard
type.  Since it is of medium priority and only high priority dialogs
are displayed, this may not be sufficient.

#if defined(__MIPSEL___)
#define PREFERRED_KBD "none"
#endif

We would rather like to go the boot-floppies way and implement
something like the following in keyboard_select() from kbd-chooser.c,
so that the keyboard type gets properly pre-selected:

#if defined(__MIPSEL___)
      my $line = `sed -n 's/^system type.*: //p' /proc/cpuinfo`;
      chomp $line;
      abort ($defs, "No \"system type\" field in /proc/cpuinfo") if $line eq '';
      if line =~ m/decstation/ {
          preferred = "DEC keyboard";
      }
#endif

What do you think about this?

What would be your preferred solution?

Regards,

	Joey

-- 
The only stupid question is the unasked one.

----- End forwarded message -----

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