Keyboard Support in the Base Solaris 7 Product

The following locales have keyboard layouts for SPARC (X-server) and X86 (Xserver PLUS console):

• Czech

• Hungary

• Poland

• Latvia

• Lithuania

• Russia

• Greece

• Turkey

[X-server is CDE and OW, console is command line]

Changing Between Keyboards on SPARC

Support for changing layouts in the Solaris product is achieved only by using the dip-switch settings under the keyboard. The keyboard layout is determined by the dip switches. A list of keyboard layouts and corresponding defined dip-switch settings is at /usr/openwin/share/etc/keytables/keytable.map.

The following table Table 2-6 is for a type 4 keyboard .(1=switch up 0=switch down).

Changing the layout from U.S./UK to Czech is done by changing the dip-switch settings to the setting defined in the file (the file defines the switches in hex. This needs to be converted into binary as it was shown in Table 2-6) and then re-booting.

Russian and Greek keyboard support can be toggled on and off using the SPARC Compose key (Ctrl+Shift+F1 on x86).

Changing Between Keyboards on x86

On x86, a keyboard is selected during the kdmconfig part of install. To change this at any time after installation, use kdmconfig:

1. Exit CDE/OW to the command line.

2. Type kdmconfig -u (kdmconfig unconfigure).

3. Type kdmconfig to run the program.

4. Follow instructions to get a keyboard layout.

There are no `utilities' for either SPARC or x86 (apart from standard UNIX tools such as xmodmap, pcmapkeys) bundled into Solaris 7 for switching keyboards.

Codesets for x86

The default codeset on the Solaris system for x86 is ISO-8859-1. The IBM DOS 437 codeset is provided as an option in text mode. That is, if you choose to download IBM DOS 437 codeset by typing:

loadfont -c 437
pcmapkeys -f /usr/share/lib/keyboards/437/en_US

there is no support for nonstandard U.S. date, time, currency, numbers, units, and collation. There will be no support for non-English message and text presentation, and no multibyte character support. Therefore, non-Microsoft Windows users should use the IBM DOS 437 codeset only in the default C locale.

• You must be in the text mode to download the IBM codeset, not the graphics mode.

• If you are not using the standard U.S. PC keyboard, replace en_US with the keyboard map related to your keyboard.

• To download the default codeset in text mode, type:

  loadfont -c 8859 pcmapkeys -f /usr/share/lib/keyboards/8859/en_US

• See the man Pages(1): User Commands loadfont(1)and pcmapkeys(1)man pages.

Locales in the Base Installation

The installation window in the base Solaris 7 product offers several English language locales. To use 8-bit characters, install one of the en_XX options, as shown in Table 2-7. The locale used in the installation becomes the default system locale.

Using JumpStart

To enable JumpStart^TM for the 8-bit locales, add the line localexx (substituting the appropriate 8-bit locale for xx, for example, en_US) to the JumpStart profile file. (For complete instructions, see Chapter 4 of Automating Solaris Installation, available from SunSoft Press.) Current JumpStart users should set the default locale to bypass the language prompt during installation.