[OpenIndiana-discuss] Problems with mate-settings-daemon

[stes@PANDORA.BE]

There's two aspects here:

 1) the language and keyboard choice during install
 2) the MATE settings

Regarding MATE, I can launch 

 mate-control-center

which seems to work: I can add layouts in Keyboard layout there as well.

I can launch the control center from the global menu : System -> Control Center as well.

Works for me ... using the latest OI 2021.04 on physical hardware ...

You have to further clarify what problem you are exactly having in the area of MATE settings. 

Now regarding the OI install.

The documentation of OpenIndiana documents language and keyboard options for the installer.

http://docs.openindiana.org/handbook/getting-started/#installing-openindiana

The screenshots there show how the installer first asks for keyboard layout.

I just tested an install ISO image from OI:

 OI-hipster-text-20200504.iso

that image on startup first asks for keyboard layout.

Another image :

 OI-hipster-text-20210430.iso

it also asks for the keyboard layout !  That's the current ISO from 2021.

I entered 15 for French and 7 for language English.

I had to use the QWERTY layout for those answers.

But from that point on it switches to AZERTY layout (the installer then starts using the keyboard with the AZERTY keymap).

So as far as I can see at least for the text installer iso images,
all is normal and as documented and how it was always in OpenSolaris as well.

After install I boot into the OpenIndiana system which was setup with keymap French.

Indeed I get:

# svccfg -s svc:/system/keymap:default
svc:/system/keymap:default> listprop keymap/layout
keymap/layout  astring  French
svc:/system/keymap:default> 


In this case I did not use my script to change the property ...

It is simply the installer that did this.

There is a technical difference however.

The installer seems to create a site.xml file 

   /etc/svc/profile/site.xml

this site.xml file contains the French setting for system/keymap the layout property.

This is basically the same but SMF is a layered database,
which I think is fairly confusing by the way,
but it gets its values from various 'layers'.

The installer is perhaps using the property via the site-profile but I am not sure.

The site.xml has a comment : 

"This file contains template of System Configuration profile.
.. It is used during first boot of installed system configures SMF"

The other layers are : admin (which is what I used 'administrative changes')
system-profile and manifest.

# svcprop -p keymap/layout system/keymap:default
French

Anyway this is technical details, there may be subtle differences in between what the text installer does and what my script does, but they goal is in both cases to change the  SMF repo.

Perhaps the site.xml was simply used during first boot to load the SMF property at the admin layer as well.

Before changing the SMF repo you can make a backup of it:

   svccfg archive > /tmp/mydb.xml

The idea of the special BE (boot environment) was also to make a backup of 

    /etc/svc/repository.db

which is the file that has the keymap/layout setting.

Regards,
David Stes