Introduction:
This documents covers the configuration of the console and XFree86 to activate a Swedish keyboard layout.
Console Mode
The installation went fine, the system even understood that I use Swedish keyboard (I have stated that during the installation procedure). The problem I have noticed was that I could not use symbols that need to be invoked with AltGr, i.e. @${[]}\|~ in console mode (runlevel 3). Some of them are of course rather important. Therefore I added keycode 96 = AltGr to the file /usr/lib/kbd/keytables/i386/qwerty/se-latin1.kmap ... which makes the right modifier key (just by the space bar, I don't know the Macish name for it) act as AltGr on a standard PC keyboard. Now the keymap works fine for my purposes. In order to be sure that I have a backup solution I have renamed the file to something like 'mykeymap.kmap'. What I needed to do was to change the contents of the file '/etc/sysconfig/keyboard' appropriately so that my keymap is loaded during the boot process.
In X
Ok, now the exciting part. As I understand the bits of documentation I have looked at, XFree 4 is intelligent enough to inherit (or infer) all necessary information about my keytable from the console setup. So I happily said startx and learned that I have only an American keyboard layout at my disposal. Not even se-latin1 is noticed!
>The first thing to do was to inform X about the Swedish keyboard by adding:
Option "XkbLayout" "se"... to the file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 in the keyboard section. This did half of the job, as was the case with console setup. The next thing was to get the {[]}\|@$ and some others to be accessible via the right meta key. I tried several modifications without success. Honestly, I found this to be the toughest part of the installation: the pointers to Franz Sirl's description of the new input layer are dead and it seems that there are no easily available documents about setting things up.
Option "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
Eventually I succeeded. The steps leading there were the following:
- I dumped the current keyboard setup by:
xmodmap -pk [ENTER]
- I created the keyboard layout file called "lombard" by modifying the existing powerpcps2 file in the '/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/keycodes/' directory, to a large extent by comparing the stuff with the output of 'xmodmap -pk', and sometimes helping myself with the 'xev'. The modification is sufficient for my purposes, but is probably not complete.
- I told XFree about my keyboard with:
Option "XkbKeycodes" "lombard"
... in the XF86Config-4 file, keyboard section, reiterated a number of times to get the arrow keys working ... now everything seems to work fine.
I found one way of getting this to work in KDE as well:
After doing the adjustments mentioned, including putting "se" into the XF86Config-4 file entry for "XkbLayout", you should DISABLE keyboard layouts in the KDE Control Center, instead of choosing "swedish" as would be the natural choice. In my case this resulted in a perfectly functioning swedish keyboard layout on my PowerBook ("Bronze" or whatever the model is called), in the KDE environment.
As I mentioned, I have experimented a bit, therefore I give no guarantees whatsoever. But enjoy my lombard file at www.cs.lth.se/~jacek/lombard.
This HOWTO was written by Jacek
