Arch Linux

scottlc

Member

From: St Andrews, Scotland

Registered: 2006-03-31

Posts: 19

GNOME keyboard layouts - severe headaches

I have a UK keyboard and have always had that as the sole keyboard layout. But recently I've found myself needing to type in Spanish. The United Kingdom with Deadkeys layout is ideal for producing accented charactors, but can be a bit annoying with the extra keystrokes required, even when not typing in Spanish. So I added both United Kingdom and United Kingdom with Deadkeys to my GNOME keyboard layouts and enabled the keyboard layout panel applet.

This worked very well, until I logged out. Upon logging back in GNOME refused to switch between layouts even though they were configured properly. Even reseting the defaults and reconfiguring wouldn't help. So I created a new testing user and tried setting it up again fresh. Exactly the same happened again, fine until logged out.

After upgrading from 2.14.1 to 2.14.2, I was curious as to whether the issue was resolved so I tried again on my main user account. It had started working again, albeit only until I logged out, then the symptoms persisted.

I considered that maybe it was an incompatability with the new X.org 7.0 release, but if that were the case it shouldn't work at all. Trying to further diagnose the problem I removed keyboard layout settings from xorg.conf. GNOME noticed the change and offered to override the settings, to which I selected yes. It had only the United Kingdom layout added. Keyboard applet said GB. But the layout was wrong, it was US, so GNOME wasn't even capable of setting one keyboard layout itself.

I've been banging my head off the wall trying to figure this out. I don't understand why GNOME is incapable of changing layout, and what happens that causes it to stop working after the first try. Hours of Googling have only revealed others with possibly similar issues, however no solutions were offered. Right now, I'm using setxkbmap to change keymap, but it's a real kludge and I'd much rather that GNOME were working properly.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Scott

scottlc

Member

From: St Andrews, Scotland

Registered: 2006-03-31

Posts: 19

Re: GNOME keyboard layouts - severe headaches

Update: I have layout switching working by making a modification to my xorg.conf. But the issue regarding GNOME keyboard settings still applies.

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "kbd"
        Option "XkbLayout" "gb,gb"
        Option "XkbVariant" ",intl"
EndSection

Snowman

Developer/Forum Fellow

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-08-20

Posts: 5,212

Re: GNOME keyboard layouts - severe headaches

You can add:

        Option "XkbOptions" "grp:shifts_toggle"

to the keyboard section in your xorg.conf. Then to switch keyboards, press the 2 shift keys at the same time.

scottlc

Member

From: St Andrews, Scotland

Registered: 2006-03-31

Posts: 19

Re: GNOME keyboard layouts - severe headaches

You can add:

        Option "XkbOptions" "grp:shifts_toggle"

to the keyboard section in your xorg.conf. Then to switch keyboards, press the 2 shift keys at the same time.

Yeah, already done that. Also got the scroll lock light as an indicator. Means that I can lose the panel applet.