LanguageSelectorImprovements
Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/pimp-my-language-selector
Created: Date(2005-12-09T17:14:17Z) by MichaelVogt
Contributors: MichaelVogt
Packages affected: language-selector
Summary
Language selector should offer a way to set the system-wide keyboard as well.
Rationale
Once the system is installed it's not easy to setup a system wide default keyboard (e.g. for gdm).
Use cases
Bob switched to dvorak and wants to have this layout system-wide.
Scope
Langauage selector needs to be modified.
Design
Key ideas:
- The default layout should be automatically suggested from the selected language.
- relationship between language and layout
- simple list of those relationships to choose default
- list includes only what is installed, rather than the entire set of languages (and you click 'add...' to install more)
- unsure if there's a standard place to store the selection of relationships
Example how others do it: ["http://www.muhammadanism.org/Unicode/text_services_input_languages_xp.gif"]
Implementation
There are three things to do here:
- change gdm so that it reads a gconf (root) variable to setup it's keyboard
- have a sensible way to configure the keyboard in language-selector
- make sure that the user gets the updated keyboard if he hasn't configured his own
gdm
The gdm keyboard setting can be applied using:
setxkbmap - layout -model - option -print | xkbcomp - :0.0
Finding available keyboard
The gnome-control-center keyboard capplet has code to figure the list of available keyboards. We also need a list that maps keyboard layout and languages. This is probably available in the installer already.
users keyboard
It should just work, if no settings are done by the user, the layout shouldn't changed.
Code
Data preservation and migration
Outstanding issues