Latin Keyboard in xorg.conf

xasanchez · 04-27-2010, 11:33 PM

Good day,

I have a latin pc105 keyboard. It behaves like a "us" one. I tried to set the XkbdLayout option to make it work as a real "la" keyboard, but no directive will be recognized by the X Server.

I tried

"la"
"es"
"latam"

What is the correct value for this parameter?

Thanks!

X

Search, and you shall find.
--Jesus Christ

ctkroeker · 04-29-2010, 03:13 PM

I use latam for my Latin American keyboard. "es" is for Spain. Does that help you?

xasanchez · 05-02-2010, 07:18 PM

I have tried out "latam" and it doesn't work. I have used "es" just to see whether it would change anything, but neither had a positive result.

What is not so clear, is that there may be several places where to put the xconfig.org file.
My distribution is Slackware 13.0.

xasanchez · 05-16-2010, 01:57 PM

As of this time today, I have been unable to make this keyboard to behave like a Latin one. However, not giving up, I was checking the logs when I start X. I discovered that X finds out the make of the keyboard and overrides the rules for the xorg.conf file.

It kind of ignores those settings and on the fly sets its own based on this discovery. It turns out this a Genius Multimedia Keyboard. It then sets up the override using the "evdev" configuration file. But what X is not so smart at, is that is assumes it is a "us" keyboard. It becomes pretty obvious that this is the real cause of my problem. That is why I still got this "us" keyboard identity.

For now, this is informational only, for those of you who are suffering from this pain. I am going to keep on trying, but if anyone can take the lead, please go on and save me some time.

Will post something later on.

TAL!

berbae · 05-17-2010, 08:50 AM

Slackware 13.0 uses Xorg server, hal and evdev to detect and configure the input devices, as default.
This is confirmed in your post #4 .

So you have two ways to go from there :

1) Telling hal your keyboard layout in a fdi file in the /etc/hal/fdi/policy directory
The default one is /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-keymap.fdi, on my machine;
so copy it to /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi and change in it the line :

from

Code:

<merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">us</merge>

to

Code:

<merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">la</merge>

or something else as you want.

Then restart the hald daemon and the X server.

2) You can tell Xorg server not to use hal to detect and configure the input devices by writing in the xorg.conf file :

Code:

Section "ServerFlags"
   Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
EndSection

So the layout is taken from the xorg.conf file.

The first way is said to be better, but it's your choice.

That should solve your keyboard layout configuration problem.
Bye!

xasanchez · 05-20-2010, 09:18 PM

Excellent! That's how it is!

It'd be very useful to know where you got this information from. I was looking for, even at the Xorg site, but couldn't find any. So that's why Slackware 13.0 says that an xorg.conf file "is no longer needed". Somebody out there said it, but it was not obvious that this is the cause.

Thanks a lot guy!

X