6. Keyboard Drivers
Once again, lack of standards shows up here. There are
quite a few Tamil keyboard layouts, the traditional typewriter
keyboard; then with the surge of internet arrived the romanized
transliteration keyboards; later the TAmil-Nadu government played
its part by prescribing a tamilnet99 keyboard. These are only a
few to talk about; we have a few others which do not fall into any
of these "standards."
There are two Tamil keyboard drivers for the X Window System,
both of them set to tamilnet99 standards (see
tamilnet99 website
for the details on the keymap). You will be able to download
both the keydrivers from the
Yahoo! tamilinix group files section
.
6.1. tamil_kmap
The first driver is tamil_kmap,
created by Vasee. It is based on the original version of
Siva. It is operable under both TSCII 1.6 and TAB encodings.
The detailed installation instructions are given in the
README file in the package. It is very
simple to install. First, untar the package into a temporary directory.
Then type:
cp ta /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/
then: cp Compose /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1
and put the shell script setkb
into a directory on your system PATH .
You may need to become root
to copy these files into these directories.
To use the Tamil keyboard, type
setkb tscii or setkb tab.
From inside the keyboard driver you will be able to switch
between the two standards, and also between Roman and Tamil
fonts.
6.2. tamilvp
The other keyboard driver, tamilvp
(vp for Visaip Palakai) is written and maintained by
Dinesh. As indicated above, you may download that from the
Yahoo! tamilinix group file section.
It is available as rpm (I have not tried it out yet). Just install
the rpm and files will be in appropriate locations. To run the
program type tamilvp and you will get the GUI
cell to choose between Tamil (TSCII 1.6 or TAB) and English.
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