Transforming Kezboards to Keyboards

Posted By: Tim Carroll Monday, October 19, 2009 8:54:20 AM

QWERTZ Preboard Updated: The Meta-Doctor Is In! Bypassing needless carrier activations for off-contract devices is all well and good, but a brand-new use for the whitehat WebOS Internals Meta-Doctor tool has just presented itself: remapping the QWERTZ keyboard of the "unlocked" German Palm Pre to the more-familiar QWERTY layout. Putting his own imported Pre on the line in the name of science, Rod Whitby has come up with an ingenious method to permanently fool webOS devices into loading the keymap of your choice: QWERTY, AZERTY or QWERTZ - and the mod will not be undone by future OTA updates, as it replaces a software token buried deep within the hardware.

The Meta-Doctor, for those not in the know, is Rod's own personal creation, which allows one to modify the webOS Doctor specific to their device to do things it otherwise wouldn't normally do: things like bypassing carrier activation, resizing the storage partitions and enabling developer mode by default. The tool is not for the faint-of-heart: it requires an Ubuntu Linux host to run, and is command-line only at this point in time. Rod will be releasing the full instructions in a day or two, but the important take-away is this: keyboard remapping is both possible and coming real soon Full instructions posted after the break. Time for a celebratory drink, fellow importers.

Meta-Doctor Remapping Instructions

as posted on the WebOS Internals mailing list

You need to change the KEYoBRD token to 'z' (qwerty), 'y' (qwertz) or 'w' (azerty).

The easiest way to do this is to use the WebOS Internals Meta-Doctor (you can get that from git.webos-internals.org, and you need a Linux box on which to run it).

Just run:

"make CARRIER=wr unpack patch"

Then modify build/.../webOS/castle.xml, adding the following line in the appropriate place:

<Val name="KEYoBRD" action="overwrite" value="z"/>

Then run:

"make CARRIER=wr pack"

and use the resulting doctor .jar file in build/... to reflash your Pre.

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