Questions about Openmoko cellphones ..

[Ben Wong]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 11:28 PM, a dehqan<dehqan65 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I was a c++ & PHP programmer before but now i'm not ;
> and should someone be a pro programmer to use openmoko ?

You do not need to be a professional programmer to use the Freerunner.


> How about keyboard? Is it possible to use farsi or at least arabic key
> board without problem?

That's something I don't know.  You may have to create one yourself.


> so how did you send that message ?
> you can test with arabic keyboard .

I did not type in the message.  Instead I used a web browser to view a
page that was written in Farsi, selected some text, copied it, and
then pasted the text into an SMS message to myself.


> what is input method ?

"Input method" just means a way of typing characters that are not on
your keyboard.  For example, in Debian GNU/Linux, one can run this
command to use a standard US keyboard to type Persian[1] using the
Iranian standard for keyboards[2]:

  setxkbmap -v -rules xfree86 -model pc104 -layout "us,ir" -option
"grp:alt_shift_toggle" -option "grp_led:caps"

When I run that on my desktop computer, I am then able to hit
ALT+SHIFT to toggle between Farsi and English input.  Now when I type
ABCabc123 on my keyboard I get ؤ‌ژشذز۱۲۳.  Of course, that doesn't
help you on the Freerunner, which doesn't have a physical keyboard.
Someone (perhaps you?) needs to design a Farsi onscreen keyboard.
Another person on this thread said that it was relatively easy, but I
don't know having never done it.

--Ben

[1]  I copied the setxkbmap example from
http://faculty.washington.edu/heer/enablingarabic.htm , with the
slight modification that I changed the layout from "us,ar" to "us,ir".
 That is, I'm using the Iranian layout instead of the Arabic.

[2]  ISIRI 2901:1994  http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/keyboards/persian.html