Subject: bug#40273: installer: No way to input Latin characters with non-Latin keyboard layouts

From: "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2020 08:24:08 +0200

On Wed, Apr 01, 2020 at 10:33:18PM +0200, Bengt Richter wrote:
> I don't know if this is useful, but seems like you can affect things
> early in the boot sequence (from the man page):
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>        Note that the kernel command line options vconsole.keymap=,
>        vconsole.keymap_toggle=, vconsole.font=, vconsole.font_map=,
>        console.font_unimap= may be used to override the console settings at
>        boot.
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Thank you for the suggestion.  With vconsole.keymap_toggle in QEMU I
do not know what key to press in order to toggle.  Right Alt key or
Alt+Shift does not work, so I believe the vconsole kernel parameter is
not used without installing the 90-vconsole.rules udev rules file from
systemd.  The rules file runs a program systemd-vconsole-setup it
seems which uses KDFONTOP ioctl:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/master/src/vconsole/vconsole-setup.c

I would prefer a toggle keymap that is set to "us" or "fr" or whatever
at runtime.  I believe this would be easiest by patching kmscon to not
only accept a layout (like now) but also a (not necessarily
hard-coded) option grp:alt_shift_toggle or grp:toggle (for right Alt
key, if the keyboard has one) or similar.  But "us" QWERTY as a fixed
toggle keymap would help too of course.

> > What do you think is the right path forward?
> Do the right thing
> :)

I hope someone who knows the codebase and what to put where made a
patch.  I should have said so.

Regards,
Florian