wine/documentation/keyboard

Wine now needs to know about your keyboard layout. This requirement comes from
a need from many apps to have the correct scancodes available, since they read
these directly, instead of just taking the characters returned by the X server.
This means that Wine now needs to have a mapping from X keys to the scancodes
these applications expect.

On startup, Wine will try to recognize the active X layout by seeing if it
matches any of the defined tables. If it does, everything is allright. If not,
you need to define it.

To do this, open the file windows/x11drv/keyboard.c and take a look at the
existing tables. Make a backup copy of it, especially if you don't use CVS.

What you really would need to do, is to find out which scancode each key needs
to generate, find it in the main_key_scan table, which looks like this

static const int main_key_scan[MAIN_LEN] =
{
/* this is my (102-key) keyboard layout, sorry if it doesn't quite match yours */
   0x29,0x02,0x03,0x04,0x05,0x06,0x07,0x08,0x09,0x0A,0x0B,0x0C,0x0D,
   0x10,0x11,0x12,0x13,0x14,0x15,0x16,0x17,0x18,0x19,0x1A,0x1B,
   0x1E,0x1F,0x20,0x21,0x22,0x23,0x24,0x25,0x26,0x27,0x28,0x2B,
   0x2C,0x2D,0x2E,0x2F,0x30,0x31,0x32,0x33,0x34,0x35,
   0x56 /* the 102nd key (actually to the right of l-shift) */
};

and then assign each scancode the characters imprinted on the keycaps. This
was done (sort of) for the US 101-key keyboard, which you can find near the
top in keyboard.c. It also shows that if there is no 102nd key, you can skip
that.

However, for most international 102-key keyboards, we have done it easy for you.
The scancode layout for these already pretty much matches the physical layout
in the main_key_scan, so all you need to do is to go through all the keys that
generate characters on your main keyboard (except spacebar), and stuff those
into an appropriate table. The only exception is that the 102nd key, which is
usually to the left of the first key of the last line (usually Z), must be
placed on a separate line after the last line.

For example, my Norwegian keyboard looks like this

<EFBFBD>  !  "  #  <20>  %  &  /  (  )  =  ?  `  Back-
|  1  2@ 3<> 4$ 5  6  7{ 8[ 9] 0} +  \<5C> space

Tab Q  W  E  R  T  Y  U  I  O  P  <20>  ^
                                     <20>~
                                        Enter
Caps A  S  D  F  G  H  J  K  L  <20>  <20>  *
Lock                                  '

Sh- > Z  X  C  V  B  N  M  ;  :  _  Shift
ift <                      ,  .  -

Ctrl  Alt       Spacebar       AltGr  Ctrl


Note the 102nd key, which is the "<>" key, to the left of Z. The character
to the right of the main character is the character generated by AltGr.

This keyboard is defined as follows:

static const char main_key_NO[MAIN_LEN][4] =
{
 "|<7C>","1!","2\"@","3#<23>","4<>$","5%","6&","7/{","8([","9)]","0=}","+?","\\<5C>",
 "qQ","wW","eE","rR","tT","yY","uU","iI","oO","pP","<22><>","<22>^~",
 "aA","sS","dD","fF","gG","hH","jJ","kK","lL","<22><>","<22><>","'*",
 "zZ","xX","cC","vV","bB","nN","mM",",;",".:","-_",
 "<>"
};   

Except that " and \ needs to be quoted with a backslash, and that the 102nd
key is on a separate line, it's pretty straightforward.

After you have written such a table, you need to add it to the main_key_tab[]
layout index table. This will look like this:

static struct {
 WORD lang, ansi_codepage, oem_codepage;
 const char (*key)[MAIN_LEN][4];
} main_key_tab[]={
...
...
 {MAKELANGID(LANG_NORWEGIAN,SUBLANG_DEFAULT),  1252, 865, &main_key_NO},  
...

After you have added your table, recompile Wine and test that it works.
If it fails to detect your table, try running

wine -debugmsg +key,+keyboard >& key.log

and look in the resulting key.log file to find the error messages it
gives for your layout.

Note that the LANG_* and SUBLANG_* definitions are in include/winnls.h,
which you might need to know to find out which numbers your language
is assigned, and find it in the debugmsg output. The numbers will
be SUBLANG * 0x400 + LANG, so, for example the combination
LANG_NORWEGIAN (0x14) and SUBLANG_DEFAULT (0x1) will be (in hex)
14 + 1*400 = 414, so since I'm Norwegian, I could look for 0414 in
the debugmsg output to find out why my keyboard won't detect.

Once it works, submit it to the Wine project. If you use CVS, you
will just have to do

cvs -z3 diff -u windows/x11drv/keyboard.c > layout.diff

from your main Wine directory, then submit layout.diff to
wine-patches@winehq.com along with a brief note of what it is.

If you don't use CVS, you need to do

diff -u the_backup_file_you_made windows/x11drv/keyboard.c > layout.diff

and submit it as explained above.

If you did it right, it will be included in the next Wine release, and all
the troublesome applications (especially remote-control applications) and
games that use scancodes will be happily using your keyboard layout, and you
won't get those annoying fixme messages either.

Good luck.

-Ove K<>ven <ovek@arcticnet.no>