Hi, I recently got a new laptop (an olpc xo) which comes with a qwerty keyboard; I have a 'homemade' usb dvorak keyboard which I'm using with it on a regular basis, switching back and forth using setxkbmap. Just now I unplugged the dvorak keyboard to use it on my work computer for a minute- and when I plugged it back in it was mapped as qwerty! This was hilarious because the built in qwerty was mapped to dvorak and the usb dvorak was typing in qwerty. But it was also intriguing because apparently there's a default keymap (ie none) applied to usb keyboards when they're plugged in, regardless of what the current x keyboard map is. If I could get that default to be dvorak, I would never have to worry about switching layouts manually!!

Any thoughts?

In Kde, that would be Control Center - Regional and Accessibility - Keyboard Layout to select the default.

I'm guessing that xorg.conf, in this sectionby changing Option "XkbLayout" "us" ot dvorak might do the same.

Um no, sorry what I meant was that I want to have the laptop's internal layout be qwerty by default, but usb keyboards be dvorak by default.

Also, the xorg files on the XO are really confusing! I tried to do an xorg implementation of keyboard layout switching (by win key) but that apparently gets ignored. But that's a different issue.