Hi all. Does anyone know of a way to change / modify the QWERTY layout
to another standard like left/right/standard Dvorak for the virtual keyboard? Thanks.

Here is what you need to customize the layout of a virtual keyboard:
1) Get the decode_vkb perl script. You use this script on the appropriate VKB file in /usr/share/keyboards to convert the VKB into an editable XML document.
2) Get both deb from here for the appropriate architecture (depending if you are doing this on the device or on a linux x86 workstation). Use ar and tar to extract the files from the deb, and then to extract the gen_vkb executable and the libimlayouts shared object from the installation archives. Put them both in the same folder -- to run you need to add the current path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Now you have the tools. Simply decode the VKB to XML, edit the file, and then re-encode it using gen_vkb. Move the generated .vkb file to /usr/share/keyboards, restart the hildon-input daemon and voila!

I have modified the en_GB virtual keyboard so that it uses the Fitaly layout. This worked well under OS2007, but with OS2008 the "baseline" attribute in the keysizes block does not appear to work -- so the keyboard isn't as nice.

Documentation is somewhat sporadic, but here is what I found:
1) maemo-dev list

Hope this helps,

Robert B.

Um...roblynn...for those of us who are a little less advanced, would you mind going a bit more into detail on step 2?...I've decoded my vkb file and edited the resulting xml, but I'm not quite sure how to reencode it. I have the deb files, and I managed to use ar (something new to me) to extract files from one, but that's about as far as I can get...

Ok, to simplify, I extracted the necessary files into a tar archive, available here.

Download the file on the tablet and untar using
This will create a folder name gen_vkb_arm in which the files will be created. Simply copy/move your xml file into this folder, cd into it, and type:
This will create a *.vkb in the current directory which you can the move/copy to /usr/share/keyboards. To have the updated config loaded into memory, you need to kill(1) the hildon-input-method process (the one with the largest process id):
Hope this helps,

Robert B.

It worked perfectly! I now have an easily accessible dash and pipe...that's going to make life so much easier!

Thanks very much for this info! I was able to move the thumb keyboard "spacebar" to the lower right corner. Now the letters are correctly aligned like on a real keyboard. I always had so much trouble with the bottom row letters (z,x,c,v,b,n,m). I also added asterisk, pipe, and backslash to the ".,-" key. No more need to switch tabs for star!

I'm surprised it was so easy to do. Thanks again for the useful information. It makes me think we need a central location for users to post their customized keyboards.

Well, \ is already on the alpha keyboard. Shift+/, and I hope you know about the shift gesture? drag the key up ~1 key height to insert shifted version. But * and | would be a royal pain if I used the thumb-board much for xterm work. I more usually pull out my BT, even when I'm walking around. (Cradle keyboard on right arm, N800 in right hand, tap keys with left hand, wish I had N810's keyboard with brain.)

up

I wanna change default keyboard on my N810

but I only see binaries nad script for OS2007 - will'em work properly on OS2008?

If you don't want to go that route, I'm using ukeyboard on my n800. It works fine with OS2008, and lets you simply pick "Dvorak" in the text input settings dialog.

On the same topic, how do I replace the keyboard bitmaps? The recognizability on some of them could be much higher - eg Return could have a solid, possibly orange, arrow rather than a thinly outlined white arrow...