N900 Ctrl-Space bug workaround for Russian keyboards.

So, I'm a lucky user of Nokia N900 mini-computer, and I often use English and Cyrillic letters. I have an "classic" English hardware keyboard(with 4 arrow buttons, not 2) on N900, with both English and Russian letters. My N900 running (latest at this moment) PR1.2.

But there is an unpleasent bug(#2501) exists, which doesn't allow to use hardware keyboard with russian letters - the Ctrl-Space layout switch doesn't change layout(but shows the notification, that layout was successfully changed). The problem, as far as I understood is that default 'English' keyboard is 4-mode only and doesn't support other modes, so layouts are changed but the same settins for modes 1-4 are used.

The 'Russian' keyboard is 8-mode and layouts switching by Ctrl-Space does work correctly. The only(big) minus is that this is incorrect layout - many symbols are on the different buttons and it hasjust 2 arrows key.

So, the quickiest and simplies workaround of this bug I found in switching to Russian layout and modify it manually to be as close as possible to the default English layout.

And it works.

I assume that you have the same N900 with English/Russian keyboard(English is primary) and PR1.2 (Maemo 5 10.2010.19-1.203.1) and hardware layout "Russian" is choosen.

All we need is to change the only file(needs root):

/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-51 .

Please, backup it somewhere, cause errors in this file may cause the system boot failure.

Here is my original rx-51: (link, md5sum) - please, check if you have the same file. If not, do all changes manually at your own risk, with undrstanding what you are doing.

And here is the modified: (link, diff)

Simply replace old rx-51 file with a new one and run command 'setxkbmap ru'.

Everything should work now. I also added Home. End. Page Up, Page Down commands for Fn+Left,Right,Up,Down respectively.

Feel free to ask questions.

Links:

Maemo Bugs: Bug #2501: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2501

Maemo Wiki: Keyboard Remapping: http://wiki.maemo.org/Remapping_keyboard