Translations and virtual touch keyboards - tracking localization

Hardware Librem 5
48

It’s long overdue to write a comprehensive guide how to add a keyboard layout from start. But unfortunately, I don’t have much time left ATM. A lot of information can be found in this thread.

So at least I will try to start writing a short how-to here and edit this post as I find the time. Hope this helps a bit - comments and corrections welcome.

Get one of the existing keyboard layouts

  • You can get one of the keyboards from the squeekboard git repository : https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/squeekboard
  • The keyboard layouts are located in the subdirectory data/keyboard/ in the .yaml files
  • Take a look and try to understand them :slight_smile:

Fork your own copy of squeekboard

  • Best way would be to start with a fork of the squeekboard repository: Create a user account at https://source.puri.sm/, go the the squeekboard git repository, press “Fork” in the web interface. You can find further instructions here.
  • Clone your fork locally with git clone and use the uri of your forked repo there

Workflow to edit your keyboard and get it merged

  • A generic guide how the workflow to contribute works, can be found at https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Contact/Contributing.html
  • Create a branch: Name it “keyboard-layout-mylanguage” or whatever
  • Checkout your branch, edit your keyboard layout and commit your changes
  • Push the local changes (to the branch of your fork of squeekboard)
  • Create a merge request for the branch to get your changes merged to the official squeekboard git repository

Compile squeekboard

Running squeekboard

  • Follow these instructions to run squeekboard: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/squeekboard/blob/master/README.md#running
  • Additionally take a look at https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/squeekboard/blob/master/HACKING.md#testing
  • You can either test it locally on your Linux system or use the QEMU Librem 5 image
  • To test squeekboard locally, you need phoc. Either compile that from the sources as well or use the CI repository ci.puri.sm for Debian based systems:
    deb [arch=amd64] http://ci.puri.sm/ scratch librem5
    Squeekboard can be installed from there as a Debian package, too (that’s what I often do). But beware - there be dragons! You could bork your system with these packages and you should probably disable this repository again after installing what you need - these packages are not meant for production systems (or so I heard :wink: )

Creating the keyboard layout

  • To be written: For the time being, take a look at Using non-latin language on Librem 5
  • The correct name of the .yaml file can be found with the command gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.input-sources sources
    The output should be something like this: [('xkb', 'us'), ('xkb', 'de')]
    So f.ex. “de.yaml” would be the correct name for the German keyboard layout.
  • The translations for the keyboard layout names in the different languages can be found at data/langs/
  • Don’t forget to add your newly created layout or translation to src/resources.rs and the layout to tests/meson.build (that’s for me, because I always forget it)

Testing the layout

  • Copy your yaml file to ~/.local/share/squeekboard/keyboards/ for testing purposes. From there it should get picked up by squeekboard
  • To test the translations in data/langs/, you have to compile squeekboard
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