Re: Configuring a US keyboard with umlauts in sid (hal etc?)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Kelly Clowers <kelly.clowers@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 14:59, Howard Eisenberger <howarde@gmx.net> wrote:
>>
>> You might want to have a look at the setxkbmap command.

I've tried that some time ago with an older version, and it turned out
that it didn't satisfy me.  I can't recall exactly why, but editing
xorg.conf was okay for me back then.

> In newer versions, you can put stuff like that in /etc/default/console-setup
> or most recently in /etc/default/keyboard  This works on TTYs and X.
>
> e.g. from my  /etc/default/keyboard :
>
> XKBMODEL="jp106"
> XKBLAYOUT="jp,us"
> XKBVARIANT="OADG109A,intl"
> XKBOPTIONS="grp:shift_toggle,ctrl:nocaps"
>
>
> OP might  need the intl or alt-intl variant of the us layout. I think alt-intl
> uses deadkeys, while intl has some AltGr forms and some deadkeys.

Thank you, that really helped. I have no idea why I didn't try that
before, but now I have again ä on AltGr-a. At least in X11, on the
console it doesn't work, but I hardly use that.

And in wdm's login screen, AltGr-a gives á, not ä, and I need AltGr-q
for ä. Well, I don't think I'll ever use login names with non-ASCII
characters, so I don't care about that.

Here's my /etc/default/keyboard:

# egrep -v '^$|^#' /etc/default/keyboard
XKBMODEL="thinkpad"
XKBLAYOUT="us"
XKBVARIANT="intl"
XKBOPTIONS="compose:caps,lv3:ralt_switch_multikey,eurosign:e"

Although I believe that (as written earlier) some of the XKBOPTIONS are
not supported.  And I also suspect that some older configuration changes
now come into play.  I remember that I had problems to get § somewhere,
but this time it just works as it used to, and there's a line

    key <AD10> { [         p,          P,       section,        paragraph ] };

somewhere in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/us, which I might have changed. I
don't claim to still understand why it is in effect, though, since it
seems to be in a paragraph called 

xkb_symbols "intl_DE" {

Regards, Frank

-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Debian Developer (TeXLive)
VCD Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg, ADFC Miltenberg
B90/Grüne KV Miltenberg