SCIM in the OLPC XO-1

[Sayamindu Dasgupta-2]

Hello,
We are considering a switch to SCIM for the next OLPC OS release (due
to be released in the first quarter of 2009). We currently use XKB,
and there is a dedicated "switch" key on the keyboard which lets us
switch the keyboard layouts. We do not want the user experience to
change, and to keep things as simple as possible, and hence we are
trying to avoid the SCIM panel. Instead, we are planning on using
scim-config-agent to configure SCIM once during first boot, and then
launch SCIM automatically with Sugar.
Does this sound like a doable plan ?
I have been searching for some documentation on scim-config-agent, and
unfortunately, I could not find any. Any pointers to any kind of
resources would be helpful :-)

Also, we have a significant number of keyboards layouts defined in
XKB[1] - is there any way to reutilize the work already done when we
switch to SCIM ?
Thank you,
Sayamindu

[1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mfg-data#Keyboards


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One Laptop Per Child

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[Jens Petersen]

> We are considering a switch to SCIM for the next OLPC OS release (due
> to be released in the first quarter of 2009). We currently use XKB,
> and there is a dedicated "switch" key on the keyboard which lets us
> switch the keyboard layouts. We do not want the user experience to
> change, and to keep things as simple as possible, and hence we are
> trying to avoid the SCIM panel. Instead, we are planning on using
> scim-config-agent to configure SCIM once during first boot, and then
> launch SCIM automatically with Sugar.

> Does this sound like a doable plan ?

I think so.

Have you tested memory requirements, etc?  If that is not an issue I think it should be fine.

> Also, we have a significant number of keyboards layouts defined in
> XKB[1] - is there any way to reutilize the work already done when we
> switch to SCIM ?

I don't know of any tool to convert xkb maps to (or from) scim-tables or m17n maps but such a tool would be very useful.

Jens

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[Sayamindu Dasgupta-2]

Hello,
Thanks for the quick response.

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 7:33 AM, Jens Petersen <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> Does this sound like a doable plan ?
>
> I think so.
>
> Have you tested memory requirements, etc?  If that is not an issue I think it should be fine.
>

We already have some users using SCIM for inputting Chinese, so memory
usage should not be a major problem. However, probably I have to look
at making a sane package selection (we have limited space on the flash
device that we use for a hard disk).

>> Also, we have a significant number of keyboards layouts defined in
>> XKB[1] - is there any way to reutilize the work already done when we
>> switch to SCIM ?
>
> I don't know of any tool to convert xkb maps to (or from) scim-tables or m17n maps but such a tool would be very useful.
>

I'll probably try to come up a rudimentary XKB->scim table converter
by the next week. However, I'm not sure how to handle keys for the
Alt-Gr characters (for example: the keyboard we have designed for
Haiti[1] has the Euro sign bound to "Alt-Gr E"). Any suggestions ?

Thanks,
Sayamindu

[1] http://wiki.laptop.org/images/9/97/CA-MP.png

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Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]

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[Doug Rintoul-2]

Jens Petersen wrote:
> Have you tested memory requirements, etc? If that is not an issue I
> think it should be fine.
I am running SCIM on the OLPC without any issues. It works great (no
panel icon of course).

Doug Rintoul.

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[Sayamindu Dasgupta-2]

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 7:33 AM, Jens Petersen <[hidden email]> wrote:

>> We are considering a switch to SCIM for the next OLPC OS release (due
>> to be released in the first quarter of 2009). We currently use XKB,
>> and there is a dedicated "switch" key on the keyboard which lets us
>> switch the keyboard layouts. We do not want the user experience to
>> change, and to keep things as simple as possible, and hence we are
>> trying to avoid the SCIM panel. Instead, we are planning on using
>> scim-config-agent to configure SCIM once during first boot, and then
>> launch SCIM automatically with Sugar.
>
>> Does this sound like a doable plan ?
>
> I think so.
>
> Have you tested memory requirements, etc?  If that is not an issue I think it should be fine.
>
>> Also, we have a significant number of keyboards layouts defined in
>> XKB[1] - is there any way to reutilize the work already done when we
>> switch to SCIM ?
>
> I don't know of any tool to convert xkb maps to (or from) scim-tables or m17n maps but such a tool would be very useful.

I wrote a tool which parses XKB maps and tries to generate M17N maps
from that. However, I'm a bit stuck with the Alt-Gr mappings - any
help would be appreciated there :-) (moreover, I'm unable to subscribe
to the m17n lists for some reasons - maybe someone on this list would
know how to get subscribed ?)

The code is available from Git at
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/sayamindu/xkb2scim

It parses XKB maps and stores the information in a dict. You can use
the tool like

parse_xkb_symbols.py <layout> <variant>

Thank you,
Sayamindu

--
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]

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