I am in serious trouble again --- I pressed something in onboard keyboard and now I am in the mode where pressing a key causes a popup of Chinese hieroglyphs to appear from which one can select. So I can't type anything anymore. How do I get out of this mode back to normal typing?
Btw, this Chinese popup caused me to think something revolutionary: is it possible to actually have an alternative (non-English) layout available alongside the English one? That would be absolutely wonderful and I didn't even dare wish for such a thing because I assumed human-made technologies have not reached such a level of sophistication yet (other than on an Intel-based x86_64 architecture where I use this keyboard layout switching in Linux all the time --- to switch between latin and Cyrillic layouts that is).
Of course I noticed onboard settings and I see that one can clone an existing layout and perhaps even edit it (though editing SVG files seems too farfetched for this task, probably I misunderstood its purpose --- or do nowadays humans directly edit layouts in an SVG representation? I must be behind the modern technologies by some 10 years and I thought nothing serious happened in all these years
But I am not talking about cloning an existing layout but switching between two different (English-US and Russian) layouts --- this would be great.
UPDATE: I have found a home page of onboard program:
https://code.launchpad.net/onboard
It has no documentation, but it has the source code, so maybe I'll figure out how to get out of Chinese mode by studying its source tree (which also has a docs subdirectory)...
UPDATE: I am still struggling with onboard layout switching, but I found a bug: you write the message "Powered off" at the very beginning of shutdown sequence but it still takes the system a few seconds to cleanly unmount filesystems etc --- the only way the user can see this is happening and AVOID taking the card out is by looking at the device from the top and noticing the LED blinking. If the user doesn't look there and takes the card out then there are chances of fs corruption (very high chances). So, the fix for this bug is print "Powering off, please wait...." instead of categorical (and wrong) "Powered off" message.
UPDATE: I "recovered" from Chinese keyboard layout by re-installing from the backup, i.e. I gave up trying to find the same keyboard shortcut that switched to it in the first place.
Now, concerning backups: I assume that all I need to backup is just the root filesystem, correct? I.e. nothing changes on any of the other partitions? Please confirm this as it is very important for me. Thank you!