POSTED-TO: fd-dev@topica.com
DATE:      29th - December - 2001

Dear all,

The new version 1.8 of the FreeDOS keyboard driver XKEYB is now ready for download.
In this version I have been able to patch in the end the last of the XKEYB bugs at
Bugtrack (which doesn't mean I don't have my own share of problems on my mailbox ;-))

Please, do read also the accompaining HELP message, where I explain how you can easily
contribute to XKEYB.

This new version has the following features:
- Scancode numbers may now range 1-127 (instead of 1-100)
- Workaround for the two keys that give the same scancode (under MFII keyboards)
   * the key on the left of right shift  (normal scancode)
   * the gray / key on the numeric pad   (extended scancode)
  This issue was meaningless under US-keyboards (where both produce the / character),
  but was a problem for most international keyboards, which should produce - and /
  respectively.
  Within a .KEY file, the scancodes for these two are now 53 and E53, respectively.
  I have patched all the .KEY files to support this.
- The extended (E0h) keys (home, ins, del, pgfwd,...) are now NOT affected by SHIFT
- All the comments in the source have been translated into English (MANY THANKS TO
  MICHAEL KALLAS)
- SCANKBD is now more command-line user friendly, and the (BP/TP) RTE200 bug is
  automatically fixed in the MAKEFILE
- Added layouts: PC860 (Jos A. Senna)
- Corrected layouts: BR850 and PC850 (Alain), SP and LA (Luis Ignacio Estrada Hoyos,
  Jos Antonio (Jafras))
- Removed layouts: PC8 (useless (COMBI only) and duplicate), RU (incorrect), ECMA94
  (useless, COMBI only)

* Maintainer: Aitor Santamara_Merino (aitor.sm@wanadoo.es), 
* Many contributors for the layouts (Luis Ignacio, Alain, Jos, Jos Antonio,...)
* Many thanks to Alain, Axel, Kabe and Jos A. Senna for their comments, and very
specially, to MICHAEL KALLAS for finishing the impressive task of translating the
comments into English (THANKS!)

Future schedule:
- Finishing a miscellaneous list of small bugs that I have been reported
- Add a decent support for codepages, allowing to change codepage, as this is a
fundamental piece for the NLS project
- Perform the modifications to the API that Matthias suggested in earlier messages

You can download the files from here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/xkeyb/xkeyb18x.zip  (binary, 71Kb)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/xkeyb/xkeyb18s.zip  (source, 44Kb)

Aitor