Hi list For my bilingual friend who normally uses Mac OS, keyboard setup was prohibitively difficult (even with me helping him) for him to use Ubuntu.
Firstly, he is a MacBook owner. Secondly, it's the British keyboard layout. As such his physical keyboard layout is slightly different to the "usual". In particular, there's no right Alt (AltGr?) key. Primarily, the language he prefers to use is British English. Being from Korea, he often needs to, e.g., IM his friends in Korean. The first thing we tried was going to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard and looking around. Straight away, I noticed that his Keyboard model was: "Generic 105-key (Intl) PC" and the layout was "United Kingdom Macintosh". OK, this seems wrong. It's far less than a 105-key board. In fact, there are a few bugs with various keys. The keys left of 1 and z both function incorrectly. So why do we have a "United Kingdom Macintosh" layout for a 105-key board? I tried changing the model to "MacBook/MacBook Pro (Intl)" and it spat the old error of "Error activating XKB configuration.". I have no idea if it's actually active at this point, but proceeding to choose a layout from this stage shows the same results -- even with the little diagram of the keyboard /still/ displaying a 105-key board. Indeed, we still have the option of "United Kingdom" or "United Kingdom Macintosh". It seems that with the physical layouts being broken, creating a Macintosh logical layout for a 105-key physical layout is a band-aid. Marching on... Adding the "Korean, Republic of" layout *again* caused the "Error activating XKB configuration." error. Hitting reset to defaults caused the error *twice*. Returning to 105-key physical layout and adding the Korean layout seemed to work. As he uses a Mac physical keyboard and doesn't have a right-alt, the both-alts layout switcher key combo is useless, so we added the keyboard switcher applet. Clicking it does indeed switch between "GBr" and "Kor". However, nothing happens. You're still typing QWERTY, but rather in US layout (no £-sign on the 3). Attempting to find the "Hangul" key (which, according to my friend is archaic DOS hangover crap) in order to toggle the Korean layout internally between US and Korean was impossible. The "show current layout" option in the GNOME keyboard switcher applet shows a nice picture of a 105-key board with a HANGUL key positioned just right of the space bar... where the right-alt would otherwise be. So, stumped, we turn to Google. People are talking about SCIM, and I recall the time when I kept accidentally triggering the SCIM layout chooser as I TYPED IN CAPITALS with the shift+space combo. I remember that you have to enable this "complex character support" thing in the Language Selector. Aha! So, we enable this, and I'm already wondering why what seems to be an entirely separate mechanism is needed here. After restarting as it suggests, I am switching to Korean and still wondering what we're supposed to do. I recall managing to get the SCIM popup to display, and then diving into the preferences only to see it has its own list of input methods for various different languages. We just wanted Korean! Also, it has its own settings for switching layouts etc. AND many of these conflict with those used by Compiz! I had utterly failed to impress my friend, and he clearly just wanted to get back to OS X. I am absolutely clueless as to how we go about fixing this mess, and just thought it would be useful to report this in a usability-report style story. Thanks for reading. Alex -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
