Additional keyboard layouts

[dhouck]

(This isnʼt relevant to the serial console, only the fb-based terminal)

Minux doesnʼt have any keyboard layouts installed besides the default QWERTY one. This is fine for most people, but many people (including me) use something other than a QWERTY keyboard. We already include the busybox utility loadkmap, but not any keymaps for it.

On non-busybox systems this is instead usually handled by the kbd utility, which comes with a bunch of keymaps already (in a different format). As far as I can tell, the standard way to get a busybox-format keymap is to take a kbd-format one and run in through the kbd-provided utility to convert it; I have not seen anyone getting a busybox keymap any other way, but it must have happened because busybox predates the kbd support for it.

The options would be

• Include the kbd package, which includes a lot of keyboard layouts (and a different way of loading them). This package is big (about 1.5 MiB difference in cramfs size); even if I manually remove some of the bigger parts it remains pretty big
• Include a handful of common kmap files in busybox format. They are individually tiny, about 2 KB
• Include all the available kmap files in busybox format. There are a lot, so this is a bit under 200 KB.

My biggest issue with the second and third options, and why Iʼm not making a PR for one of those right now, is that it requires either checking in a bunch of opaque binary files, or requiring kbd on the host (which itʼll probably have but best not to assume).

If you have the kbd source tarball, the busybox-formatted keymaps can be generated with

tar xf kbd-2.9.0.tar.xz
for file in kbd-2.9.0/data/keymaps/**/*.map; do
        relpath="${file#*/*/*/}"
        output="bb/${relpath%.map}.kmap"
        mkdir -p $(dirname "${output}")
        if readlink $file; then
                ln -s $(readlink "$file" | sed -E 's/.map$/.kmap/') "$output"
        else
                loadkeys -b "$file" > "${output}" || (
                        echo "Failed to process file $relpath"
                        rm "${output}"
                )
        fi
done

I think my preferred option is option 3, or 1 since I always overestimate how much this project should care about space.

[dhouck]

(If you like option 1, itʼs probably a good idea to disable the busybox commands that kbd replaces too)