Ethiopian Setup

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Revision as of 22:10, 2 October 2007 by BernardoInnocenti (talk | contribs) (Update instructions.)
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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 (not needed from build 611 on):
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" XKB keyboard layout.
  • 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 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).