August 4, 2005 9:10 pm Dave Neary General

For shame…

I finally got around to backing up all my data, music & photos for the past few months this evening, with the intention of installing Ubuntu on my PPC, and kicking the MacOS X habit.

Alas, I’m back in MacOS X again. I wa going to install it in any case, because my wife likes it, but given that I can’t type # or @ in Ubuntu on a standard Macintosh French keyboard, I can’t see myself booting into it regularly for the next while. When I have more time, I’ll maybe try to figure out XKeyMap stuff again.

Also, I was a little annoyed that the (marginally unusual) case of English language and a French keyboard would cause so many issues. During the installation, I was asked for a country, language preference, and keyboard config (which worked fine). Then after the first boot into GDM, my keyboard was in US layout (very useful when you have numbers in your password).

And after logging in, and configuring the keyboard for myself, I still have no idea how to configure the keyboard layout system-wide, even though it’s obvious that I’m not going to have a different keyboard plugged in for each user…

I’m not quite a JWZ’s “last time”, but I have had far too much trouble configuring keyboards, sound cards and fonts in my short life, once every 4 or 5 years is more than enough, thanks.

2 Responses

  1. Stephen Kitt Says:
    August 5th, 2005 at 6:28 pm

    I’ve got a similar setup under Debian – a French keyboard on a system with locales for English and French for various users. Under XFree86, the keyboard layout is specified in the relevant “InputDevice” section in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:

    Section “InputDevice”
    Identifier “Logitech iTouch”
    Driver “keyboard”
    Option “CoreKeyboard”
    Option “XkbRules” “xfree86”
    Option “XkbModel” “logiinternet”
    Option “XkbLayout” “fr”
    EndSection

    I imagine X.Org is similar…

    Configuring the keyboard layout used on the console, again system-wide, is done using dpkg-reconfigure console-data.

  2. Floris Bruynooghe Says:
    August 5th, 2005 at 7:50 pm

    Indeed Ubuntu does aks for keyboard information on console but does not put this in the X system. Very shamefull indeed.

    To get it correct system wide you need to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and look for Section “InputDevice” that is your keyboard (Identifier “Generic Keyboard” Driver “keyboard”). In that section you want to change the Option “XkbLayout” “us” to your locale.