Skip to content

liskin/btservices-kbdlayout-s60v5

Repository files navigation

Introduction

Once upon a time, there was a Symbian^1 phone, let me call it Tube, and it was sad because it did not have a keyboard. It decided to turn on its BlueTooth receiver and look for a keyboard. Tube was lucky this day and it found an awesome foldable keyboard, and the two of them became friends. Later that day, the keyboard found out that there's something weird about Tube — it interprets the key presses in a strange way, some keys produce different characters than what's written on them. They were worried that they might be unable to fix this, as Tube had no idea about its source code and the keyboard was pretty sure it wasn't its fault. Then they called me…

What really happened?

Tube is a nickname of Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic, the first Symbian phone with touchscreen, running Symbian S60v5. Using the driver for S60v3.2, it supports any BlueTooth keyboard that supports the HID profile. However, the layout is fixed and cannot be changed (at least on my 5800 the application crashes whenever I enter settings). This is an attempt to overcome this limitation.

What is this exactly?

This is a slightly modified version of the btservices package from Symbian^3 which compiles on Symbian^1 and produces the kbdlayout.dll file that you can replace on your S60v5 phone and use a customized layout.

In addition to the modifications needed for the DLL to work on S60v5, I added an Alt+Shift switching layout template and a Czech layout and modified the US layout to make Caps Lock behave like Escape. This is the default and if you want something else, you'll have to change it before you compile it. I will be happy to include your layouts in this repository, don't hesitate and send them to me!

How to use it?

Most likely you'll want to change the layout and compile it yourself. To change the layout, you should know this:

  • btservices/bluetoothengine/bthid/layouts/group/kbdlayout.mmp contains a list of files to compile. You may want to change this.
  • btservices/bluetoothengine/bthid/layouts/src/hidlayoutimplproxy.cpp contains a CMyLayout class. This specifies the layout that is used.
  • To change Caps Lock back to its original meaning, see the relevant git commits.

To compile the DLL, you'll need an SDK for your phone, which is most likely here (it can be installed on Linux as well, see the gnupoc project). When you have it ready and your environment is set up to use the SDK, perform the following steps which will compile kbdlayout.dll for you.

  1. chdir to btservices/bluetoothengine/bthid/dependencies
  2. $ bldmake bldfiles
  3. $ abld build gcce urel
  4. chdir to btservices/bluetoothengine/bthid/group
  5. $ bldmake bldfiles
  6. $ abld build gcce urel
  7. copy …/s60_50/epoc32/release/gcce/urel/kbdlayout.dll to C:/sys/bin in your phone
    (please note that you'll either need to use RomPatcher to unlock system folders, or repackage the sis file with the Wireless Keyboard application and sign that using your dev certificate; it is beyond the scope of this README to document any of this)

Author & Copyright

The original source code is taken from Symbian3, that is © Nokia Corporation, and it is available under the terms of Eclipse Public License v1.0.

The modifications and new layouts have been done by Tomáš Janoušek http://work.lisk.in/ in 2010.

About

Customization of HID keyboard layouts for S60v5 (tested with Nokia 5800XM)

Resources

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published