[Arm-netbook] Fwd: Virtual-Keyboard for TabletPC

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Philip Hands <phil at hands.com>
Date: Wed, May 19, 2010 at 4:28 PM
Subject: Re: [Arm-netbook] Virtual-Keyboard for TabletPC
To: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <luke.leighton at googlemail.com>
Cc: Linux on small ARM machines <arm-netbook at lists.phcomp.co.uk>


On Wed, 19 May 2010 15:41:06 +0000
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <luke.leighton at googlemail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 7:53 AM, Michelle Konzack
> <linux4michelle at tamay-dogan.net> wrote:
> > Hello *,
> >
> > is this the list death?  I get no messages anymore!
>
>  naah, it's just quiet.
>
> > However, NO, "xvkbd" is NO SOLUTION, it is OLD and crappy and of
> > course, does not support arabic/farsi!
> >
> > OK, the last days I was on a voyage and have seen again a TablePC
> > runing the XFCE Desktop Environment with a GTK2+ virtual keyboard.
> >
> > Does someone know, where I can get it?
>
>  mmm... naah - but i know someone who has done a virtual keyboard for
> the openmoko (or at least, has got it working) - transparent overlay
> and everything.  maajor hack, though.

Yeah, I tweaked the keyboard button in the status bar of Enrico Zini's
Zavai so that it would run xvkbd pretty much full-screen floating and
stuck to the top (using xmonad as the window manager to make that so)
and then made it semi-transparent (hmm, I forget what I did that with).

Anyway, I was mostly wanting to have a proof of concept for a
translucent full-screen landscape keyboard, on the basis that that gives
the biggest target to hit with your fingers.

Given the cobbled-together nature of what I did, it worked surprisingly
well -- the use of a keyboard friendly window manager meant that one
could do quite a lot without needing to hide the keyboard to get mouse
control back, so for my use it was pretty good.

Normal people would really hate it though -- Menu? What menu?

If anyone cares about the details of what I did, I'm sure I can work it
out for you, so feel free to ask (but it was just a proof of concept,
there were some fairly rough edges on it, and it wasn't difficult to
get it to pretty-much lock up by confusing the keyboard focus)

Cheers, Phil.
--
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