Hey All,

After a wee bit of tinkering I'm now happily tapping away with a Dvorak layout on my Stowaway bluetooth keyboard! In case anyone else out there would like to use the Dvorak layout I'll scribble down a little "How To" below.

Before we get down to the nitty gritty of configuring your N800 you'll need to install "XTerm" and have some method of acquiring 'root' access to the device. You'll also have to download the file attached to this post which contains the appropriate "xkb" symbol map for Dvorak. I'll assume that you've saved it to the external SD/MMC card.

- Open up an X terminal session.

- Acquire 'root' access. If you have "Dropbear" installed simply type 'dbclient root@127.1' and enter 'rootme' when prompted for a password. You should now be logged in as 'root'. The string before the prompt will probably have changed to something similar to "...Nokia-N800...". You can type 'whoami' to verify who the current user is. The command will echo 'user' if you're still logged in as user or 'root' if everything has gone to plan.

- The next step is to navigate to the "xkb" symbol map directory which is a simple as typing 'cd /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols'. If you now have a look at the contents of this directory (by typing 'ls') you'll be able to see a set of symbol map files. All the usual suspects from the "Layout" drop-down in the "Control Panel" are to be found here. Our plan is to incorporate a Dvorak layout by being a little bit sneaky and replacing one of the default layouts with our custom one. I decided to use the "us" layout so that by choosing this in the "Control Panel" you'll have a Dvorak keyboard instead of the standard Qwerty one.

- Since I have a healthy fear of deleting things while logged in as root we'll make a backup first! We'll rename the current "us" layout by executing the following command 'mv us us_original'. Typing 'ls' and tapping return should now show that the "us" symbol file has been renamed "us_original".

- Now we simply have to drop in our replacement file. I'm going to assume that you downloaded the attached file to the root of the filesystem on the external SD/MMC card. To copy the file from the SD/MMC card to the symbol map directory execute 'cp /media/mmc1/us_dvorak.txt ./us'. If you execute 'ls' once more you'll hopefully find both "us" and "us_original" symbol files in the directory.

- For the sake of being extra tidy we're going to remove the "executable" permissions from our new symbol file. This simply tells the N800 that the new file cannot be run as a programme. Type 'ls -al' and you should see a more detailed listing of the directory contents. Our new "us" file will probably have extra permissions (found in the first column of the output), notably "x" will be visible in three of the fields. To remove this type 'chmod ugo-x us' and tap return. If you now type 'ls -al' again the "us" file permissions should be identical to all of the other symbol files.

Although not strictly needed we'll now reboot the N800 to make sure everything is ready to roll. After your N800 has rebooted you should find that by choosing the "us" layout in the "Control Panel" you'll now actually have a Dvorak layout! Woohoo!

If you have any trouble getting this to work just let me know. Happy typing!

..graham.