Re: XFree86 and xkb

[Jihad Daoud <jihdao-6 at sm dot luth dot se>]

Hi,
(I am new to the list and the lazy me have not been reading the archived back log, tell me when I mention stuff you been through already!)

Was looking around for more stuff about the subject.
Using setxkbmap you can select the keyboard mapping you want to use.
I use "setxkbmap se" for Swedish, it's language based and not country based. In our case it should be ar (AR, ar_AR or even Arabic if you want).
setxkbmap will first look in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules/xfree86.lst to find out if there is a rule for the keyboard language mapping.
Then it will go to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules/xfree86 to check out which keyboard you have.
Then it expects a file in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols, in case of Swedish it's "se".

So far nothing mentioned about countries and "ar" does not exist, no conflict is there with Argentina!

We start fixing XF86 and then move on to the fancy stuff.
KDE and GNOME use ar.png for Argentinan flag! It's a lot of fun to add all the Arabic country flags and submit them to KDE and GNOME people but I think that we need the AR.png (or what ever, but not ar.png) to represent Arabic and not a specific country, hey we might become one country again someday!

In summary:	XF86 xkb is language based. ar for Arabic. Need to be added.
		KDE and GNOME kbd selector are country based! We might consider making an exception for Arabs and assume that they belong to one country and let the Arab League's flag goes there (if so, come up with the two letter abbreviation that will do and is not occupied by any country, Arab nation maybe (an) or Arab league (al, but I bet that Albania got this one!).

It's new year eve and can't start testing (actually have to wait for two week or so) to see how xkbsel_gnome_applet, the keyboard selector, would behave (using GNOME as I said before!)

Have fun tonight.
-- 
Jihad Daoud
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When you are there, you are definitely not here. If you are not I, and I happened to be here!