Re: keyboard and xdm

[<furball@gubbe.ch>]

Hej,

> Since I am getting started with Debian Linux am still struggling a bit 
> with certain configuration problems. The first problem that I hav is 
> probably a trivial one. I would like to have kdm start straight after 
> booting, rather than xdm. Where do I change this.
> Second, I cannot fully use my swiss-german keyboard. I cannot use the 
> special caracters like: ??? or @#|~ etc. Does anyone have any idea?

I solved the issue with the swiss german keyboard by setting it 
to use a standard pc-102 keyboard mapping. (which is not precisely
the same as mac; eg. '@' character is placed differently). This
can be done by setting the relevant part in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 :

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
        Driver          "keyboard"
        Option          "CoreKeyboard"
        Option          "XkbRules"      "xfree86"
        Option          "XkbModel"      "pc102"
#       Option          "LeftAlt"       "Meta"
#       Option          "RightAlt"      "ModeShift"
        Option          "XkbLayout"     "de_CH"
EndSection

To make the apple-key behave like AltGr on pc-keyboard (the one
that gives you access to @, # etc), change following lines from
/etc/X11/xkb/keycodes/xfree86 from ...

    <RALT> = 113;
    // Microsoft keyboard extra keys
    <LWIN> = 115;

... to ...

    <RALT> = 115;
    // Microsoft keyboard extra keys
    <LWIN> = 113;

that works for me, as I'm used to swiss-german pc-keyboards.
If you need a real mac-alike swiss-german setup... can't help :)

However, as we're currently there: setting keyboard layout in
debian configuration for X is not entirely trivial - IIRC it 
displays only an inputbox where you are requested to enter your
keyboard layout (where basically I would have entered 'sg'
for swiss german, as it used to be [... ages ago...]). It 
would be most convenient to have a list of available choices.

bye
Philipp Kaeser