[CentOS] Switching keyboard language (was: Re: Locales and filenames)
ken
gebser at mousecar.com
Thu Oct 29 13:55:27 UTC 2009
On 10/28/2009 09:10 AM Alfred von Campe wrote:
> On Oct 27, 2009, at 19:28, ken wrote:
>
>> E.g., create a file with vi with just one German/Greek/French word,
>> say,
>> Έντελέχεια (Entylecheia, an ancient Greek word). If the
>> name of the
>> file is "nonenglish", then, after you do your save in vim, run the
>> shell
>> commands
>>
>> touch temp; mv temp $(cat nonenglish)
>
> I guess my issue is how these characters get generated in the first
> place. By cutting and pasting the word "Έντελέχεια" from
> your email into a file on Linux (via the Synergy mouse & keyboard
> sharing utility no less), I was able to create a file containing that
> word and also named that word and display it correctly with cat and
> ls. So UTF-8 encoding appears to work just fine. It's 8-byte
> characters in ISO 8859-1 encoding that are causing my problem.
> Fortunately, I think I don't have to deal with ISO 8859-1 encodings,
> and my problem was self-created by cutting and pasting characters
> from the iso_8859-1 man page.
>
> Now I have a follow up question: so far I've only been able to enter
> non-ASCII characters on my Linux system by cutting & pasting; how do
> I actually generate any of these characters on a system with a US
> keyboard?
>
> Thanks for all that have helped me solve this problem.
>
> Alfred
There are a lot of keyboard configuration files under /lib/kbd/keymaps/.
One of these is loaded at boot-time, probably the one you configured in
when you first set up the system. I don't know all the steps you'll
need to do-- I've never tried to do what you're doing-- but read the
xmodmap manpage and then examine the keycodes in the keymap files
mentioned above. For example, mk-utf.map.gz under
/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty has coding to toggle one keymap to another.
IOW, you'd type in one language, hit a couple keys to toggle the
keyboard into another language, and then hit another couple/three
hotkeys to get back to English... or whichever your home language is.
Unless there's some app I don't know about, this is going to be a lot of
work, especially if you have to figure out how keymaps work. But work
it out and you'll be linux-famous.
Document everything.
More information about the CentOS
mailing list