Minimak on Chromebook?

[Paul Hammond]

Does anyone know if it's possible to configure Minimak or other custom keyboard layouts in Chrome OS?

[Ted Lilley]

Hi there,

At the moment, no, there isn't.  I actually use a Chromebook about half of the time, and I have to type QWERTY.  I had it working with Minimak for a while, but the procedure was exceedingly involved and it finally caused me to have to reinstall ChromeOS entirely, so I stopped bothering.

I submitted a request to the developers to support Minimak but they unsurprisingly turned it down.  ChromeOS only offers a handful of keyboard layouts and they control the list pretty tightly.  The only chance would be to get Xorg to include it in the X distribution, but I haven't pursued that.

Sorry.

[Paul Hammond]

Thanks. When you say "exceedingly involved", what sort of procedure are we talking about? I'm not asking you to go into any detail. I guess it means rooting around in developer mode?

[Ted Lilley]

- enabling developer mode

- run a couple scripts to get the root filesystem writable - this is what nearly bricked my system last time

- following the linux directions for installing minimak

- every boot log into chrome shell and run setxkbmap

- repeat entire process every time chromeos updates (frequent)

It finally broke my machine so hard I was scared to do it any more.

[Paul Hammond]

That does sound like too much hassle.

I suppose the only way is for someone to write a Chrome extension. I see there is one for Greek Dvorak, for example. Probably would only work within web pages though, not UI elements such as the address bar, nor in Flash.

[Ted Lilley]

Yes, it makes me sad.

I haven't pursued any kind of extension strategy since my primary use is on the command line.  I use crouton to do development in ubuntu on my Chromebook.  If I can't do it there, I'm not going to confuse myself by switching layouts between windows.