Ethiopian Setup

Development is being tracked here: http://www.codewiz.org/wiki/EthiopianLocale

• Update your OS image if it's older than 571

• Boot, switch to the console (alt-F1) and login as root.

• Edit /etc/rpm/macros.pilgrim and add am_ET to the list of %_install_langs.

• Install the Amharic font locally:

cd /home/olpc
mkdir .fonts
cd .fonts
wget http://www.codewiz.org/pub/Abyssinica_SIL.ttf
fc-cache

• Add the olpc-bernie yum repository:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget http://www.codewiz.org/pub/olpc-bernie/olpc-bernie.repo

• Install a few updates from olpc-bernie:

yum update libX11 xkeyboard-config

• For glibc, yum will not work because we install the i686 package even though uname -m says i586. Additionally, a glibc utility ran by the post install scriptlet breaks on JFFS2 because it depends on an unsupported filesystem feature. So we need to play a few dirty tricks around the package installation:

cd /
wget http://www.codewiz.org/pub/olpc-bernie/i386/os/glibc-2.6.90-13.i686.rpm
wget http://www.codewiz.org/pub/olpc-bernie/i386/os/glibc-common-2.6.90-13.i386.rpm
mount -t ramfs none /usr/lib/locale
rpm -U --ignorearch glibc-2.6.90-13.i686.rpm glibc-common-2.6.90-13.i386.rpm
mv /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive /
umount /usr/lib/locale
mv /locale-archive /usr/lib/locale

• Set the LANG environment variable in /etc/sysconfig/i18n

LANG=am_ET.UTF-8

• You can switch between IM in the Write activity through the RMB context menu, although the Amharic IM only appears to work the the "us" keyboard layout.

• To use the X Input method, you need to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and enable the Ethiopian layout alongside the US layout. This will make "us" the default and "et" a secondary layout:

XkbLayout "us,et"

Alternatively, you can do that on the fly by opening the developer console (Alt-=) and type:

setxkbmap -model olpc et,us

• You can switch between layouts by hitting the "mode switch" key, which is mapped on the key labeled multiply/divide on US keyboards.