Re: [Freedos-devel] mkey keyboard

[Wilhelm Spiegl]

Hi Ralf,

you are right. I checked it, all three keyboard layouts have the same basic system, so even if it would work it would require to modify all three keyboard programs.

That is nonse. I admit this hereby officially. Sorry Tom, I have to excuse myself!

 

Nevertheless it is weird that two different versions are used in FD. But life is life.

 

But I still think about adding turkish layouts in mkeyb. It would make much things easier. Which amount do you think I should pay for a charity community, Tom? I would pay up to 300 Euro for this, of course you will get a copy of my bank account (account values deleted, only the money I will pay will be shown).

If you want, you can send me the response to my mail address directly.

 

Willi

 

 

Sent: Friday, December 31, 2021 at 11:36 PM
From: "Ralf Quint" <freedos...@gmail.com>
To: freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Freedos-devel] mkey keyboard

On 12/31/2021 9:19 AM, Wilhelm Spiegl wrote:

mkeyb supports a lot of keyboard layouts e.g. "gr" for german etc.
FreeDOS uses the set lang= xy variable for many country related things.
but the gr etc. in mkeyb xy differ from this variable that is used for nls, help etc.

Would it be possible to change the country characters in mkeyb e.g. german from "gr" to "de" and so on so that it is possible to say "mkeyb %lang%" to get the correct keyboard layout in FD without big problems?
This would be a great help for the users and for Jerome.

Well, no,not really.

As Tom already mentioned, those keyboard layout codes have always been that way, since the first version of DOS that had a KEYB "driver". And for compatibility reasons, this should be the same.

The reason for GR instead of DE is that all those abbreviations are derived from the English language, as in "GeRmany", not "DEutschland". Hasn't been a problem though either, as there was, at least not officially AFAIK, a GReek KEYB option. For the same reason it is SP for SPain (not ESpana), HU for Hungary (not Magyar), though they chose SU for SUomi  instead of FI for Finland (not sure if that was a stab against the then still existing Soviet Union, LOL).

You also need to understand that the keyboard layout codes are NOT identical with the "language" being used (for example in translations), as for example both US and UK are for different keyboard layouts used in the US of A and the United Kingdom, even though they both are supposed to be English Speaking countries. Same goes for FR and CF, which defines the keyboard layout for FRance and French Canada respectively, though the on screen language in both cases is French. Or PO and BT for POrtugal and BRazil, which both use (some form of) Portuguese.

I don't have an easy way to test this right now in any Windows version, but I am pretty sure that a similar distinction exists there as well, though those settings are there made within a GUI tool not by using command line parameters line in DOS...

Ralf

 

 

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