Hello everyone,
I'm trying to create a preseeded installation for Debian 13 "Trixie" (using the amd64 netinstaller), and I'm running into a persistent issue with the keyboard layout that I can't seem to solve.
My goal is simple:
The final installed system should have English as its language and locale (en_US.UTF-8).
The keyboard layout, however, must be German (de).
All other parts of my preseed file (partitioning, package selection, etc.) are working perfectly. The only issue is that the keyboard layout always defaults to US English, ignoring my settings.
I've tried numerous combinations in my preseed.cfg. My most recent attempt looked like this, trying to be as explicit as possible:
# Localization
d-i debian-installer/language string en
d-i debian-installer/country string DE
d-i debian-installer/locale string en_US.UTF-8
# Keyboard selection
d-i console-setup/ask_detect boolean false
d-i keyboard-configuration/xkb-keymap select de
d-i keyboard-configuration/layoutcode string de
Despite these settings, the result is always an English layout. For due diligence, I did a manual installation where I selected these options interactively, which worked perfectly. Comparing the debconf-get-selections --installer output from that successful install with my preseed file doesn't reveal any obvious differences that would explain this behavior.
What is the definitive, canonical combination of preseed options to reliably force a specific keyboard layout when it differs from the chosen system language and locale? Is there a specific option I'm missing that overrides xkb-keymap?
Thanks for any help you can provide.