Special characters are not displayed
 

Hi!

Just downloaded and installed Arch linux. Everything works like a charm and I just can't stop loving the lightweightness of this distro. I keep getting this one annoying problem though. I'm using a norwegian keyboard, but I can't get KDE to display the special characters correctly. When I press a key which should be mapped to one such character, I just get two empty boxes - as if the font I'm using does not include these characters. But when running KCharSelect, I am able to verify that they are supported by the font. In addition to this I am successfully using the same font on another system (Debian sid). The font is Sans Serif by the way.

I also tried using other fonts, but with no luck; the same problem occurs also then. It seems like those keys are mapped to wrong characters or something like that....

Does anyone knows what could be wrong, how to fix it or how to remap the special sharacter keys?

Thanks

Hey. A good test of exactly what the problem is would be to see whether a terminal is capable of displaying those characters, because the keyboard might be a separate problem. You could find a text file in that language, save it to your computer, and cat it on a kde terminal or view it in kwrite or something. It probably still won't display correctly--if it doesn't, one thing that might help is changing your locale.

Edit /etc/locale.gen, uncommenting out whatever region code corresponds to norway (preferably, the utf-8 version), then running /usr/sbin/locale-gen. I don't use KDE, so I don't know how KDE keyboard configuration works, but I select my X keyboard by running "xorgconfig" on the command line and generating a xorg.conf file. If I already have a working config file, I just compare and copy the keyboard section to the file I'm currently using. The command to change an X keyboard on the fly is "setxkbmap", but you need to know the name of the keyboard setup--you can see the various keyboard setups in /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/*/ if you are using the latest version of xorg on arch linux.

Hope some of this helped.

Thanks, I tried to enable the norwegian locale, but that didn't help.

The problem seems though to be a KDE related one. For example KDM (KDE login manager) works fine and displays all the characters perfectly. The same can be said about Firefox. But the native kde applications are still not displaying the special characters correctly.

And even more weird is the fact that when I write something in Firefox (with special characters) then copy and paste it into a kde application, everything works and the characters are displayed beautyfully. But when I press the key corresponding to the special character, it displays only the two empty boxes. So again, it seems like kde applications associate the keystroke with a wrong character.

I still haven't figured out how that can be fixed though :(