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AKBD(4) Device Drivers Manual AKBD(4)

akbd — Apple Keyboard Device

akbd* at adb?
wskbd* at akbd? mux 1
option AKBD_LAYOUT=XXX

This driver supports ADB keyboards within the wscons(4) console framework. It doesn't provide direct device driver entry points but makes its functions available via the internal wskbd(4) interface.

The following is a partial list of supported AKBD devices:

  • Apple Standard Keyboard
  • Apple Extended Keyboard
  • Apple Keyboard II
  • Apple PowerBook Keyboard
  • Apple Adjustable Keyboard
  • Apple PowerBook extended Keyboard
  • Apple PowerBook G3 Keyboard
  • Apple PowerBook G4 Keyboard
  • Apple iBook Keyboard

The akbd driver supports a number of different key mappings which can be chosen from with the kernel option “AKBD_LAYOUT” at compile time or with the utility wsconsctl(8) (variable: “keyboard.encoding”) at runtime. Other mappings can be used if the whole keymap is replaced by means of wsconsctl(8). The built-in mappings are at this time:

KB_DE
(de) German with “dead accents”.
KB_ES
(es) Spanish.
KB_FR
(fr) French.
KB_JP
(jp) Japanese.
KB_PT
(pt) Portuguese.
KB_SF
(sf) Swiss French with “dead accents”.
KB_SG
(sg) Swiss German with “dead accents”.
KB_SV
(sv) Swedish with “dead accents”.
KB_UK
(uk) British.
KB_US
(us) English/US keyboard mapping (default).

The KB_DE, KB_FR, KB_SG and KB_SV mappings can be used in the KB_NODEAD (.nodead) variant. This switches off the “dead accents”.

To set a German keyboard layout without “dead accents”, use wsconsctl keyboard.encoding=de.nodead. To set it at kernel build time, add the following to the kernel configuration file:

option AKBD_LAYOUT="KB_DE|KB_NODEAD"

adb(4), intro(4), ukbd(4), wskbd(4), wsconsctl(8)

The akbd interface first appeared in NetBSD 0.9. It has been under development ever since.

Bradley A. Grantham wrote the original akbd driver, including the MRG support. The hardware direct interface was written by John P. Wittkowski.

The list of built-in mappings doesn't follow any logic. It grew as people submitted what they needed.

January 15, 2015 OpenBSD-current