Hi Tom, Jerome, everybody, > however using any OS with the wrong keyboard driver is simply shit.
Trying to explain: Imagine your keyboard has AZERTY written on it. Then DOS comes and simply assumes you have a "normal" QWERTY keyboard. Now every time when you press the A button, DOS types Q for you. Big pain! You basically have to pretend that your keyboard has all the QWERTY- specific writings on all the keys to be able to type stuff when DOS blindly assumes that your keyboard would actually be QWERTY style. >> Finally, I will be using mkeyb to set the keyboard layouts. It only >> has roughly 30 or so languages. > > even as author of MKEYB: there is no reason to ignore the other ~60 > keyboards that are available in freedos 1.0. >> XKEYB is also installed and the user may change over to that for >> more choices. > > MAKE IT A SETUP QUESTION. NOT ONLY FOR ADVANCED USERS. The suggestion to use MKEYB is an attempt to compromise: MKEYB already has the most popular layouts AND config for it could be squeezed into a reasonably small amount of BAT code and only 1 question to the user. The installer could even make reasonable assumptions and offer default settings based on the language selected for the installation, but the two topics (translations and keyboard layout) are mostly independent. The choice of XKEYB is so big that a big advanced menu would have to be implemented, which might be asking too much from Jerome's time... Users with less popular layouts could therefore answer the question on MKEYB layouts with "I have none of those" and the installer could then say "Okay, read this text file with a list of XKEYB layouts and type a layout name for XKEYB at this prompt..." Which would be less fun for the user than some quick "pick one of those layouts, select 0-9 / A-Z" in the initial MKEYB menu but also less work for Jerome to implement, compared to a full menu with descriptions for tons of possible XKEYB layouts. I admit that I am simplifying the XKEYB problem here. I omit the "sub ID number" and "which definition file" part. Even having to fill in some extra prompts can be less pain than having to use EDIT to update AUTOEXEC manually later, while being in the "wrong" layout. Regards, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel