BertieBigBollox@gmail.com wrote:
> Installed Solaris 9 on my Blade 1500 to which is attached a standard
> UK USB PC keyboard and mouse.
>
> Trouble is its not working properly. For starters (and most
> importantly!) I cant get the pipe character - instead I get ^@ when I
> hit the pipe key.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Yes. I installed Solaris with UK support.

This is just a poor rehashing of the things I have learned from "ottomeister", a
Sun employee working on Sun Ray firmware who fully understands keyboards, and
you are better off searching the Sun Ray mailing list archives for information
on keyboards from him/her.

http://www.sun-rays.org/mailing-list.html

One such short email on the subject is:
http://www.mail-archive.com/sunray-u.../msg00434.html

However, there are longer ones that go into more detail both for Linux and Solaris.

That being said, keyboards need to have their layout properly set in their
firmware, so that when the X server queries the keyboard it can apply the proper
layout. Sun as a responsible keyboard manufacturer always ensures that their
keyboards report the proper keyboard layout code; however, many PC keyboard
manufacturer's just set the layout value to '0'. In the land of UNIX, this will
cause the X server to use a US keyboard layout instead of the appropriate one.

If you are only going to be connecting UK layout keyboards that report
themselves as layout '0' keyboards on this machine, you can edit the default
keytable mappings to change all type '0' keyboards to be UK keyboards.

I think this would be done by editing:
/usr/openwin/etc/keytables/keytable.map

And change:
0 0 US4.kt

to:
0 0 UK4.kt

There is also an xkbtable.map that may need to be edited if you are using xkb.

Again my understanding of this problem and solution is completely 2nd hand, and
I have never had to use it in the past having always purchased Sun keyboards.

Neal