NAME¶
install-keymap — expand a given keymap and install it as boot-time keymap
SYNOPSIS¶
install-keymap [
keymap-name | NONE | KERNEL]
DESCRIPTION¶
install-keymap usually takes a
keymap-name as argument. The file
is passed to
loadkeys for loading, so that valid values for this
argument are the same than that of arguments to
loadkeys.
install-keymap expands include-like statements in that file, and puts
the result in
/etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz, which will be loaded into
the kernel at boot-time.
One may also specify
KERNEL instead of a keymap name, causing
/etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz to be removed, making sure that no custom
keymap will replace the kernel's builtin keymap at next reboot.
An argument of
NONE tells the command to do nothing. It can be used by
caller scripts to avoid handling this special case and needlessly duplicate
code.
The purpose of this processing is to solve an annoying problem, of 2 apparently
conflicting issues. The first one is an important goal of keymap management in
Debian, namely ensuring that whenever the user or admin is expected to use the
keyboard, the keymap selected as boot-time keymap is in use; this means the
keymap has to be loaded before a shell is ever proposed, which means very
early in the booting process, and especially before all local filesystems are
mounted (
/etc/rcS.d/S10checkroot.sh can spawn
sulogin).
The second issue is that for flexibility we allow that
/usr or
/usr/share may live on their own partition(s), and thus
/usr/share/keymaps, where keymap files live, may not be available for
reading at the time we need a keymap file. And no, we won't put 1Mb of keymaps
in the root partition just for this.
And the problem is, most keymap files are not self-contained, so it does not
help to just copy the selected file into the root partition. The best known
solution so far is to expand the keymap file so that it becomes
self-contained, and put it in the root partition. That's what this tool does.
FILES¶
- /etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz
Where the boot-time keymap is stored
SEE ALSO¶
loadkeys (8).
AUTHOR¶
This program and manual page were written by Yann Dirson dirson@debian.org for
the
Debian GNU/Linux system, but as it should not include any
Debian-specific code, it may be used by others.