Re: keyboard mapping problem under X
Bruno Boettcher wrote:
> Hello [..]
> i use, whilst living in France, a german keyboard...
You take the trouble to mention this: any special reason? For
instance, do you want to type mostly French on a German keyboard?
> still, dead-keys aren't working....
> so, what possibilities remain to activate them? without
> redefining a whole new keymapping, especially since the system
> seems to have changed?
KDE or Gnome have GUI utilities that will make the keyboard do
what you want (i.e. without directly editing system files).
Probably in something called "System, Keyboard".
If (like me) you want to avoid using KDE/Gnome, you can *also*
make the keyboard do what you want. The German keyboard is called
"de". It has several so-called "variants":
-basic (this is the default, which has several dead keys)
-nodeadkeys (no keys are dead)
-deadgraveacute (only grave and acute are dead)
-deadacute (only acute is dead)
-ro (includes special characters for Romanian. I don't know why
this is included in a German keyboard description; maybe
German keyboards are commonly used in Romania)
-ro_nodeadkeys
-... etc, etc, ...
See the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/de. The "variants" are
described in sections beginning with xkb_symbols.
You can select whatever variant you want by typing in a terminal
(e.g. xterm) window:
setxkbmap de [-variant <name of variant>]
E.g.
setxkbmap de -variant deadgraveacute
If you just want to use the "basic" variant, you just type
setxkbmap de
You can use the setxkbmap command to experiment with keyboard
layouts and variants. Once you have selected what you want, you
can put it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, in the keyboard section, in a
slightly different format, using one line for the keyboard and
another for the variant, e.g.:
Option "XkbLayout" "de"
Option "XkbVariant" "deadgraveacute"
This will make your selection (semi-)permanent.
There are many more possibilities for handling the keyboard in X
(not so many on the console). For instance, you can switch between
entirely different keyboard layouts by defining a special key. For
details, see below, sections 6.1 and 6.2.
Regards, Jan
http://www.jw-stumpel.nl/stestu.html
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