Ethiopian Setup

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

• Update your OS image if it's older than 612

• 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.

• 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

• 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-2.6.90-17.i686.rpm
wget http://www.codewiz.org/pub/olpc-bernie/i386/os/glibc-common-2.6.90-17.i386.rpm
mount -t ramfs none /usr/lib/locale
rpm -U --ignorearch glibc-2.6.90-17.i686.rpm glibc-common-2.6.90-17.i386.rpm
mv /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive /
umount /usr/lib/locale
mv /locale-archive /usr/lib/locale

NOTE: any version of glibc below 2.6.90-17 won't work!

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

LANG=am_ET.UTF-8

• To use the XKB Ethiopian layout along with US layout, you need to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf. This will make "us" the first and "et" a second layout:

XkbLayout "us,et"
XkbVariant "olpc2,basic"

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

setxkbmap -model olpc 'us(olpc2),et'

---

• 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" XKB keyboard layout.

• You can toggle between the us and the et layouts by hitting the group switch key, which is mapped to the rightmost key below enter (labeled multiply/divide on US keyboards).