Keyboards - Availability in Canada

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 12:56:59PM -0500, Amanda Yilmaz wrote:
> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 03:05:06AM -0500, Amanda Yilmaz wrote:
> >> Update: I finally found a layout in X which matches ISO 9995-3 in all
> >> respects, including the placement of #: it's the "Netherlands Macintosh"
> >> layout. So choose that one if you want the 9995-3 layout (I just made it
> >> the default on my laptop).
> >>
> >> My apologies to everyone for cheerfully beating this topic to death, but
> >> I really do get into this stuff. :-D
> > 
> > Hmm, I tried picking that layout in X, and it bahaves exactly like the
> > US layout.  I can't get it to do anything else (right alt is not behaving
> > as altgr).  How odd.  Any idea what the 3rd level shift key is?
> 
> The 3rd-level shift key is usually right Alt by default...
> 
> Which distro are you using, and which desktop environment (if any)? And
> have you explicitly altered xorg.conf or made any special customizations
> via xmodmap?

I was using kde 4.3 and asked it to switch the keymap.  I wonder if it
did or not.  When I picked US international, it made a difference.

Debian unstable is the distribution.

> On the Ubuntu GNOME desktop, you can bring up the Keyboard Preferences
> dialog by choosing System > Preferences > Keyboard. On the "Layouts"
> page there's a button called "Layout Options". If you press this, a
> Layout Options dialog pops up which allows you to choose all sorts of
> options regarding key placement; any option shown in bold has been
> changed from the default setting. I'd especially look under "Alt/Win key
> behaviour" and "Key to choose 3rd level"; you may need to set the "Key
> to choose 3rd level" explicitly.
> 
> This dialog is of course a front end to XKB (the X Keyboard Extension),
> which provides the "setxkbmap" command for changing the keyboard layout
> dynamically, no matter what was specified in xorg.conf. In fact, my
> xorg.conf doesn't specify a default layout (which probably means it
> reverts to "us"); certainly it's something else (shell script?
> gnome-settings-daemon?) changing the layout to layout "nl", variant
> "mac" after I log into my user account. If you're not using GNOME or
> KDE, maybe you will need to call setxkbmap explicitly as well, to
> override whatever your distro is doing behind the scenes?

I think I found a bug in KDE 4.3.  If I go to the page for selecting
what is the level 3 shift key and such, and apply that too, then suddenly
the right alt starts to work.  Silly KDE.  It was already set to right
alt, but unselecting and selecting it again and hitting apply fixed
things it seems.  Now I can do stuff.

The 2009 draft has a level 5 of course which I think right alt should
access, although I don't think anyone has implemented that one yet.
It seems to mostly add accent dead keys to the various keys.  A lot of
symbols get moved around too by it.

`1234567890-=\ (plain)
~!@#$%^&*()_+| (shifted)
¬¹²³$‰¾&•]}—≠  (altgr)
≈¡½⅓¼⅜⅝⅞⅛±°—   (shifted+altgr)
qwertyuiop[]   (plain)
QWERTYUIOP{}   (shifted)
@ł€®™¥↓→ø´[]   (altgr)
ΩŁ—®Ŧ¥↑ıØ˝{}   (shifted+altgr)
asdfghjkl;'    (plain)
ASDFGHJKL:"    (shifted)
́§°£ŋħ„“”‘’    (altgr)
Ƨ÷ªŊĦ‚‘’′″    (shifted+altgr)
zxcvbnm,./     (plain)
ZXCVBNM<>?     (shifted)
«×©“”nµ«»…     (altgr)
<⋅¢‘’Nº<>      (shifted+altgr)

For some reason altgr+a doesn't work, while altgr+shift+a does work
(so I can only get upper case for some reason).  It should produce æ.
The upper case being Æ of course.

Overall not bad.  I think I will stick with this for a while.
So Netherlands Macintosh PC104 with right alt level 3 shift and menu
key for compose.  Nice combination.

-- 
Len Sørensen
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