Dvorak + Pinyin on Chromebook

So I bought a Chromebook, and found out that I couldn't via normal settings get it to use Dvorak with pinyin input. Luckily someone else also had this issue, and already found a way around it.

Warning: The method to update this is dangerous. You will delete everything, and could break your system. 

Also if you have never used vi before, practice somewhere else first. It is an advanced editor with a learning curve.

So before you can use the previously mentioned method you have to turn on developer mode. This will wipe the chrome book, so backup anything that's that important.

Here is a link explaining how to turn on developer mode.

I am extremely appreciative of the person who submitted the fix. I wanted to add 3 minor updates to their procedure.

1. To open a crosh shell, press CTRL+ALT+T after you log in.
2. After you do step 2, you need to reboot before you can do step 3.
3. The Dvorak mappings are also in the .../symbols/us file you need to edit. Just look farther down. Use vi's visual copy feature to more safely copy those lines into the first section. 

Here is a link to their fix.

Once you have done that and rebooted you should be good to go. Don't forget if you disable developer mode you will most likely loose this hack.

Unity, Dvorak, and Google Pinyin.... oh my!

Just a quick post today.

A month or two back I decided I should try out Unity instead of just using KDE all the time. I did this for a lot of reasons, but mostly cause I like to try new things. I went into this knowing that the newest Ubuntu has some issues with Chinese input. A few I had dealt with on the KDE side. So, I went ahead and just installed it alongside my Kubuntu packages. It 99% just worked, and that was great. One Issue that I ran into was my Google Chinese input seemed to be locked to the standard Qwerty keyboard.

This made me sad. I am a Dvorak guy, and I like typing my pinyin with Dvorak. So, I first tried to find "that setting", you know that one setting that will make everything right if you can just find it. I failed. Next, I went in search of how to fix my problem on the interwebs. I didn't see an answer that suited me. Man, I need to get better at interweb searching. So lastly I deded I would go at it terminal style.

Terminal style means you grep around for configuration files and modify them and see what happens. It's completely scientific. Did I mention I made up the term "terminal style?" Anywho I hit the jackpot, and fixed my problem. Hopefully this little tweak will fix your problem also. I assume your using ibus like me, if not you may need a similar file but in a different location.

1. try to locate googlepinyin.xml
2. sudo vi /usr/share/ibus/component/googlepinyin.xml
3. modify the line that looks like this "<layout>us</layout>" to look like "<layout>us-dvorak</layout>“
4. restart your ibus-daemon

Then all was right with the world. Now 6 - 9 months from now when I mess up this computer I'll have a record of what needs to be done. ^_^ Hopefully It will help someone else also.

On a related note while I was searching the interwebs I came across a post about Chinese pinyin frequency mapped to Dvorak. The poster shows some heatmaps and keypress frequencies. It's quite fascinating, and if I ever get fast at typing pinyin, Dvorak isn't a bad keymap to do it on.

下次见！