Trouble with getting macrons on vowels
For years, I've set new Trisquel installs to use Māori as the input language, so that when I hold down the right-hand ALT key and type a vowel, I get a vowel with a macron (like the ā in Māori). When I first installed Trisquel 10 on my Compaq laptop, I'm pretty sure I did the same, but then at some point I noticed holding down ALT+vowel wasn't producing macrons. I looked at the keyboard layout settings and Māori seems to have disappeared from the list of options. This is annoying, but I assume it's to do with Ubuntu reducing the number of languages they support, not anything the Trisquel team have done.
Anyway, I switched back to Latvian, which is what I've used in the past in distros where Māori input support isn't available. From what I remember that worked in Trisquel 10, but then randomly stopped working. The keyboard layout was still set to Latvian, but holding down ALT+vowel wasn't producing macrons. I just switched to Esperanto and now it's working again. Who knows for how long this time.
Does anyone have any idea what might be going on here or where I might be going wrong?
I looked at the keyboard layout settings and Māori seems to have disappeared from the list of options.
Using GNOME on Trisquel 11, Maori is one of the listed input sources (in the "Keyboard" settings), as shown in the attached screenshot.
On regular Trisquel 11 with MATE, I am getting Māori in the keyboard layout options listed by language. Something may be broken in Trisquel 10, but I do not have any Nabia system any more to check. I may try on a Nabia ISO.
Magic Banana:
> Using GNOME on Trisquel 11, Maori is one of the listed input sources
Good to know. Using Mate on Nabia, New Zealand is missing from the country list, and Māori is missing from the languages list.
prospero:
> Something may be broken in Trisquel 10
It certainly seems that way. Would it be a good idea to file a bug at this point, or shall I wait to see if the community can shed more light via the forum/ mailing list?
[EDIT: removed obsolete stuff]
Things actually start working after I add the Māori layout in System > Preferences > Other > IBus Preferences. I believe that may be the consequence of a change brought about by a Nabia update. Have you tried that? In short, the "logical" path System > Preferences > Hardware > Keyboard is now obsolete for layout matters.
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/keyboard-language-does-not-show-bottom-panel#comment-166385
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/trisquel-100-feedback#comment-162688
prospero:
> Things actually start working after I add the Māori layout in System > Preferences > Other > IBus Preferences. I believe that may be the consequence of a change brought about by a Nabia update. Have you tried that?
Just tried. Went to the Input Method tab and clicked Add. Māori is not in the list there.
> In short, the "logical" path System > Preferences > Hardware > Keyboard is now obsolete for layout matters.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a terrible UX. I hope it gets tidied up in future updates, or at least in T11.
At the risk of asking the obvious, have you applied all available updates? Māori is in the iBus layout list in Trisquel 11, in Trisquel Mini 11 and in the Trisquel 10.0.1 live ISO, so either you did something peculiar that caused the problem in Nabia, or you are missing on updates.
The separate UI for iBus indeed feels like a minor redundancy. I am not adding or removing layouts every other day, admittedly.
prospero:
> At the risk of asking the obvious, have you applied all available updates?
Yes, I keep on top of system updates, but I can understand you asking. Oh and yes, I have tried turning it off and on ;)
> so either you did something peculiar that caused the problem in Nabia, or you are missing on updates
I guess I must have but I have no idea what. The update suggestion doesn't really make sense to me, unless Māori was removed as a language in one set up updates and then restored by a further set.
There is one other possibility that occurred to me. I recently noticed some trouble accessing files on an older partition on the internal drive. It's possible the drive might be starting to fail. Could this cause some update to be downloaded improperly or not applied properly, leading to something like a missing input language?
> unless Māori was removed as a language in one set up updates and then restored by a further set.
Such a temporary disappearance (i.e. regression) may or may not be deliberate. I was thinking about the latter situation, but the former can also happen, from time to time. Both may be corrected in subsequent updates, but I would also run sudo apt full-upgrade, in case obstructing packages need to be removed.
Note that we are talking about keyboard layouts here. Since Māori is both a language and a specific spelling of names in the English language, it may have been upgraded from a keyboard layout option of the English language, to the Māori layout for the Māori language of Aotearoa, which may or may not explain its mysterious temporary disappearance as a layout. As things stand, it is not listed as a UI language in Trisquel 11.
Please use iBus to manage the input language keyboard.
That will help you to easily manage the swithc between languages.
Regards.
Once again I sit down at my Trisquel 10 system and try to type a letter with a macron above it (eg Māori) and the keyboard shortcuts for it have mysteriously stopped working (I currently have to cut'n'paste them from the web). I ran a large update process a couple of days ago, the last time I used to laptop, so I suspect something is being affected by upgrades each time this happens. I still have both Latvian and Esperanto as keyboard input languages, sitting above English, and both have given me working macrons in the past, but not today. Māori is still completely absent a language option in the Language Support, Keyboard > Layouts, and IBus Preferences parts of the control panel.
You could upgrade to Trisquel 11:
$ sudo do-release-upgrade
Me, a month ago:
> Once again I sit down at my Trisquel 10 system and try to type a letter with a macron above it (eg Māori) and the keyboard shortcuts for it have mysteriously stopped working
... and now they've started working again, just as mysteriously.
> You could upgrade to Trisquel 11
Indeed I could, and that might well solve the problem for me, on this laptop. But if Nabia is still officially supported, it would be good to figure out what's causing this odd behaviour and fix it, in case it also causes problems for others.