[9fans] Raspberry Pi: keyboard layout

[Murray Colpman <muzerakascooby@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I'm an absolute beginner to Plan 9, I just installed it on my Raspberry
Pi for fun to have a see what it's all about. I understand this being a
very new build there are likely to be some issues, so do know that I'm
not holding my not-so-smooth experience against Plan 9 ;)

After a lot of wrangling with getting it compatible with my custom boot
menu (actually a very hacky Linux binary that shoves the necessary
config files into the Raspberry Pi boot partition and reboots, each OS
having to manually put the boot menu config files back in place on
boot), helped by some very nice people in #plan9 on Freenode, I now move
onto the other problems.

The biggest one for me, being a Dvorak user, is that I cannot get the
keyboard layouts working. I'm starting to form a vague idea in my head
about how Plan 9 is working, but I probably have a lot of things wrong,
so do bear with me.

When I run the kbmap program, attempting to set a map flashes up an
error about not being able to find /dev/kbmap. Looking at the manpages,
it seems that /dev/kbmap is supposed to be brought in with bind -a
'#kappa' /dev (with kappa obviously replaced with the actual kappa
letter). I did snarf the kappa from the manpage, and I also tried typing
it on the keyboard in various ways (compose, *, k for instance), so I
don't think that the issue is that I'm unable to type kappa correctly.
Anyway, when I run this bind command, I get "bind: #kappa: unknown
device in # filename" (again, kappa replaced with the actual kappa).


Any ideas?


Thanks a lot,
Murray Colpman.