On Thu, Sep 04, 2025 at 09:17:19PM +0200, M Ghost wrote:
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.
Redirecting to debian-boot; debian-project is for project-wide discussions rather than this sort of thing.
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.
This sounds as though perhaps you tried to do the preseeding using a method that's only processed after the locale and keyboard questions have been asked. https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apbs01.en.html#preseed-methods explains this, and offers two different suggestions on how to handle it.
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?
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apbs04.en.html#preseed-l10n should describe the set of options, bearing in mind the above.
Regards, -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]