Arch Linux

rsolva

Member

Registered: 2015-03-18

Posts: 19

[SOLVED] Possible to set Norwegian Colemak-layout in console?

I have combed the internet for days to try to find a solution to this problem with no luck, so I guess it's time to put this question to the Arch community.

My goal is to get the Norwegian Colemak-layout to work in the console. This worked fine when I used elementaryOS (Ubuntu 18.04) for a while, but I can't for the life of me find a solution for this in Arch. Which is really annoying.

Here is what I know so far; if I put

KEYMAP=colemak

in /etc/vconsole.conf, I get the english colemak layout. I currently use

KEYMAP=no

which is the default Norwegian QWERTY layout. The Norwegian Colemak-layout works fine under Xorg (XFCE4), no problem there. I tried using localectl as it is supposed to "convert" the kxb layout to vconsole.conf, but that did not do the trick either, it simply put

no-latin1

in the vconsole.conf.

I do not use a graphical display manager, just the default user authentication in the console. It's really annoying having to use QWERTY to type my username and password, as I have used Colemak exclusively for the last 10 years.

Why did this work flawlessly in Ubuntu – what config file or component am I overlooking to get this to work in Arch? Is it at all possible?

Last edited by rsolva (2019-05-17 18:15:41)

ugjka

Member

From: Latvia

Registered: 2014-04-01

Posts: 1,885

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Possible to set Norwegian Colemak-layout in console?

You might try to compile it to the console keymap yourself using this https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ckbcomp/

Man page: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bio … omp.1.html

Last edited by ugjka (2019-05-17 09:54:40)

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rsolva

Member

Registered: 2015-03-18

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] Possible to set Norwegian Colemak-layout in console?

You might try to compile it to the console keymap yourself using this https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ckbcomp/

Thank you good sir for pointing me in the right direction! For anyone else wanting to do this in the future (probably me in ~1 years time), here is what I did:

ckbcomp -layout no -variant colemak > no-colemak.map
gzip no-colemak.map
sudo mv no-colemak.map.gz /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/colemak/

I haven't tested the keyboard layout extensively yet, but the layout seems to work as expected so far! The final step to make this change persistent is to update the /etc/vconsole.conf with "KEYMAP=no-colemak".

Last edited by rsolva (2019-05-17 18:23:14)

rsolva

Member

Registered: 2015-03-18

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] Possible to set Norwegian Colemak-layout in console?

For anyone else wanting to do this in the future (probably me in ~1 years time)....

Well, would you look at that. Didn't take a full year for me to reference this solution. I'll take a look at putting this into the wiki at some point.

Last edited by rsolva (2019-10-18 21:19:18)