Arch Linux

cgarcia

Member

Registered: 2010-08-09

Posts: 39

Keyboard layout not set until first key pressed

I just have plugged an external USB keyboard to my laptop. To start, I had to manually add the usb modules (usb_common, usbcore, usbhid) to mkinitcpio.conf because otherwise it didn't work when LUKS asked for the passphrase at booting (at BIOS or grub menu it was fully available, though). I haven't tested if these three modules are required or only a few of them.

The most weird thing is  however a minor (but curious) problem: after booting, the USB keyboard is in US english instead of in Spanish (XFCE uses the system defaults, and xorg is set to Spanish). It remains in US english until I press any single key on the non-USB keyboard (or until I manually run setxkbmap, which I may add to .xinitrc if I don't find another less ugly option).

It seems as if the keymap were loaded on-demand, but loading were not triggered by pressing keys on the USB keyboard... why?

byte

Member

From: Düsseldorf (DE)

Registered: 2006-05-01

Posts: 2,046

Re: Keyboard layout not set until first key pressed

> I haven't tested if these three modules are required or only a few of them.

'usbhid' should be enough, the rest are dependencies.

As for the layout problem: search the forum, I know I've seen the exact same problem before. (... and am currently too lazy to search myself, sorry ;-)

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1000

cgarcia

Member

Registered: 2010-08-09

Posts: 39

Re: Keyboard layout not set until first key pressed

I think that the problem is related with my external USB keyboard (Ozone strike battle) having a combo of pointer and keyboard (despite not having pointer hardware!) as xinput reports. I have confirmed with xev that when changing from pressing keys on the external USB to the laptop keyboard, a  MappingNotify appears, but not when going back to the external keyboard. This is an old bug not yet solved upstream, but there are patches proposed:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49950

I have not search exhaustively the Arch forums but there are more reports (at least this one, but with no insight on the underlaying problem):

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=138005

elmuz

Member

Registered: 2015-04-19

Posts: 16

Re: Keyboard layout not set until first key pressed

I have the same problem, with the exact same keyboard... Any workaround  would be very appreciated.