INSTALL-KEYMAP(8)					     INSTALL-KEYMAP(8)



NAME
       install-keymap	 expand  a  given  keymap and install it as boot-time
       keymap

SYNOPSIS
       install-keymap [keymap-name | NONE | KERNEL]

DESCRIPTION
       install-keymap usually takes a keymap-name as argument.	 The  file  is
       passed  to loadkeys for loading, so that valid values for this argument
       are the same  than  that  of  arguments	to  loadkeys.	install-keymap
       expands	include-like  statements  in that file, and puts the result in
       /etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz, which will be loaded into the kernel  at
       boot-time.

       One may also specify KERNEL instead of a keymap name, causing /etc/con
       sole/boottime.kmap.gz	 to be removed, making	sure  that  no	custom
       keymap will replace the kernels builtin keymap at next reboot.

       An argument of NONE tells the command to do nothing.  It can be used by
       caller scripts to avoid	handling  this	special  case  and  needlessly
       duplicate code.

       The  purpose  of  this processing is to solve an annoying problem, of 2
       apparently conflicting issues.  The first one is an important  goal  of
       keymap  management in Debian, namely ensuring that whenever the user or
       admin is expected to use the keyboard, the keymap selected as boot-time
       keymap is in use; this means the keymap has to be loaded before a shell
       is ever proposed, which means very early in the	booting  process,  and
       especially     before	 all	local	 filesystems	are    mounted
       (/etc/rcS.d/S10checkroot.sh can spawn sulogin).

       The second issue  is  that  for	flexibility  we  allow	that  /usr  or
       /usr/share   may   live	 on   their   own   partition(s),   and   thus
       /usr/share/keymaps, where keymap files live, may not be	available  for
       reading at the time we need a keymap file.  And no, we wont put 1Mb of
       keymaps in the root partition just for this.

       And the problem is, most keymap files are  not  self-contained,	so  it
       does  not  help to just copy the selected file into the root partition.
       The best known solution so far is to expand the keymap file so that  it
       becomes	self-contained, and put it in the root partition.  Thats what
       this tool does.

FILES
       /etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz

       Where the boot-time keymap is stored

SEE ALSO
       loadkeys (8).

AUTHOR
       This  program  and  manual  page  were  written	by  Yann  Dirson  dir
       son@debian.org  for  the  Debian GNU/Linux system, but as it should not
       include any Debian-specific code, it may be used by others.



							     INSTALL-KEYMAP(8)