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

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi,

I have a Thinkpad T43p which has a quite complete keyboard, and it comes
with US layout. Which I like.  However, I'd also like to be able to
easily input german Umlauts.  I don't like the compose approach, it
needs too much keypressing for fast typing. Instead I want to use the
AltGr key to turn AltGr+a to ä, AltGr+A to Ä and so forth.

In lenny this worked fine.  Now I have upgraded to unstable, and it
stopped working. I'm writing here to get some help.

I found out that there are two places that claim to be responsible for
keyboard configuration now:  One is /etc/default/keyboard, the other
would be /etc/hal/fdi/policy.

However, I can't figure out how to do it right.  /etc/default/keyboard
has keywords just like the old xorg.conf, but not quite.  There, I have 

XKBMODEL, XKBLAYOUT, XKBVARIANT, and XKBOPTIONS

in xorg.conf, I used this definition for my keyboard:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
        Driver          "kbd"
        Option          "CoreKeyboard"
        Option          "XkbRules"      "xorg"
        Option          "XkbModel"      "pc104"
        Option          "XkbLayout"     "us"
#       Option          "XkbVariant"    "intl"
        Option          "XkbModel"      "thinkpad"
        Option          "XkbOptions"    "compose:caps,lv3:ralt_switch_multikey,eurosign:e"
EndSection

So I tried

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

(and also with XKBVARIANT="intl" and "intl-altgr"), but that doesn't
recover the old behavior.  It seems those xorg options are simply not
supported, as "dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration" tells me.


So I looked at the other way, but I can't find an example file that
looks like it could contain settings like the ones above.  Finally, I
find /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-x11-evdev.fdi - which
seems to delegate its configuration to evdev, which is documented as
being configured in xorg.conf. Err.


Any hints how I should proceed?

Regards, Frank



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