PiBox » Xeon

Googling around, I found a newer version of Matchbox keyboard. This might help with the size issues. But I'll have to switch from local source (an app template) to remote source (a wrapper template) to use it.

• https://git.yoctoproject.org/matchbox-keyboard/ - the original version
• https://github.com/Xlab/matchbox-keyboard - even more recent, I think, than mwilliams03.

One other thought: I tested this without running matchbox. Maybe I should try that and see if the keyboard works better.

The Xlab version doesn't build with a wrapper template because it requires the fakekey lib in the staging tree. That's when I discovered that matchbox-* are already in Buildroot.

So now I'm testing the keyboard that comes with buildroot to see how it works. Since these are already in the build I should be able to switch to the alternate repos and try them.

Duh. It does work and is a full sized keyboard that fills the top of the display. This is fine for now. But I'll need to integrate different keyboard xml files for the phone, likely with larger keys. The numpad keys are fine, as in

matchbox-keyboard numpad

The keyboard name "numpad" is the suffix of the keyboard-<suffix>.xml layout files in /usr/share/matchbox-keyboard/. So dropping new keyboard descriptions there is how to go forward.

Note that the layouts directories in both of the alternate repos have additional keyboard layouts. I can also google for matchbox-keyboard layout for additional examples.

Eventually I may want to embed the keyboard in apps, but I'll decide that later when I need the keyboard input with, for example, the pidialer.

Buildroot downloads a released file from yocto: https://git.yoctoproject.org/matchbox-keyboard/snapshot/matchbox-keyboard-0.1.1.tar.gz

This file says it's 0.1.1 but it's not the master branch. The master branch has lots of updated keyboard layouts, with the ones in the release archive pushed to an "old" directory. But those "new" keyboard layouts are from as far back as 2012, so 0.1.1 is really old.

1. Change the MATCHBOX_KEYBOARD_VERSION in the matchbox-keyboard.mk to "master" to have it pull the latest code instead of the older 0.1.1. This works if done manually.
2. switching to git/master for the yocto releases
3. switching to the mwilliams repo using GitHub's zip release.

Note that the layouts in mwilliams are similar to the latest in Yocto's release but the former has, at a minimum, added a keyboard-mobile layout. The ones in Xlab are limited, possibly just for use in Taiwan.

Bumping to master mostly works, but the install process is broken on the yocto repo. There are also multiple warnings from autoconf/autotools.

Switching to mwilliams03 to see if that works better. Based on the commits it doesn't look like any install changes were made. I'll have to figure this out myself and patch it.

Going back to my template build: I can build the Yocto master branch with the template build, after adding -lXrender to the CAIRO_LIBS env variable. Normally this would get added to the LIBS= but that variable gets overridden by the build. Since Cairo only has one lib, and I know that its libcairo, I just add CAIRO_LIBS="-lcairo -lXrender" and the linking for the Yocto master branch succeeds.

Doing this build gets me the updated keyboard layouts, but does NOT include the mobile keyboard.

So now I'll try the same build with the mwilliams03 build since it DOES have the mobile keyboard layout.

ugh. The mwilliams03 source includes the mobile keyboard but it doesn't include it in the build install. It's just an extra file. I'll need to create a patch to the Makefile.am to generate the keyboard layout file from a *.in file (which will look exactly the same as the existing file) and then install it. Alternatively, I can just add it to the end of keyboards_DATA, which should skip the file generation process for that layout file.

I need to fix pmsui to work with Xeon (RM #1090), specifically to allow the console login, before I can continue with this issue.

The mwilliams03 version has a mobile keyboard configuration, but the others do not. So I'm trying that.

I created a tarball, /home/mjhammel/src/ximba/work/matchbox-keyboard/mwilliams03.tar.gz, that I can unpack on the SD card for Xeon. After boot I can copy these over to /usr/share/matchbox-keyboard/layouts (after moving the existing layouts out of the way). Then I can try the keyboard variants.

The mwilliams03 layouts seem to work okay but have the same size problem. I should note that the keyboard.xml from the mwilliams03 collection doesn't work, but switching back to the yocto version of that file make it and the others work fine.

It looks like this bit of code in matchbox-keyboard-ui.c sets the height of the app:

          if (get_desktop_area(ui, NULL, &desk_y, &desk_width, &desk_height))
            {
              /* Assuming we take up all available display width
               * ( at least true with matchbox wm ). we resize
               * the base ui width to this ( and height as a factor )
               * to avoid the case of mapping and then the wm resizing
               * us, causing an ugly repaint.
               */
              if (desk_width > ui->xwin_width)
                {
                  mb_kbd_ui_resize(ui,
                                   desk_width,
                                   ( desk_width * ui->xwin_height ) / ui->xwin_width);
                }

              wm_struct_vals[2]  = desk_y + desk_height - ui->xwin_height;
              wm_struct_vals[11] = desk_width;

              XChangeProperty(ui->xdpy, ui->xwin,
                              atom_NET_WM_STRUT_PARTIAL, XA_CARDINAL, 32,
                              PropModeReplace,
                              (unsigned char *)wm_struct_vals , 12);

              DBG("desk width: %i, desk height: %i xwin_height :%i",
                  desk_width, desk_height, ui->xwin_height);

            }

I could patch this and test if it changes the height, or I could write a an app that sets it's height and embed the keyboard in it. The widget that embeds the keyboard would then set the height instead of my trying to modify the keyboard code. See the example/matchbox-keyboard-embed.c code for an example of this. This seems like the best way to deal with this because the widget embedding the keyboard can then switch keyboards via user request.

One way to test this would be to use a VM so I could install matchbox libs from the yocto source to /usr/local, then play with the embed module to see how that would work.