Hello everybody,

I am new Linux user (Lubuntu 13.0.4) and I am having a problem with my keyboard. My keyboard is French (Canadian), which is just a QWERTY keyboard adapted to French. In this keyboard some important accents and special characters are typed by pressing Ctrl + Alt + certains keys. In my case these accents and special characters do not show at all. For exemple, the «at» that you need to type an email address is obtained by typing Ctrl + Alt + 2 and it doesn't show at all. If I try to type it when using AbiWord instead of showing this character it changes the size of the text from 12 to 14. More worringly, when I try to use the terminal prompt I am able to enter thre command that I want (ex: sudo apt-get install flashplugin installer), but when I press enter and the prompt asks me to type my passsword I am totally unable to do it because my keyboard ceases to work completely and I am no longer able to type anything.

I have reinstalled Lubuntu to try to correct this problem paying special attention to the selection of the keyboard. Although my keyboard was selected correctly, I tested the keyboard at the installer prompt but he characters did not show up anyway.

Could this be just be my keyboard (an old Dell Quietkey USB keyboard which came with my Dell Dimension 2400 series with a Celeron processor that I bought way back in 2005) ? Or is this a Lubuntu/Ubuntu issue? This is strange because my keyboard works fine in the Windows XP enviroment ( I have a Dual Boot).

Any help will be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Bruno Zero

Sorry to tell you this, but ubuntu/lubuntu/etc. 13.04 versions are 'end of life', out of support'. I'd get a newer install disc, like lubuntu 14.04 which has just been released, and try that.

on my keyboard, i can access @ with "Alt Gr" + "2". The "alt Gr" key is on the right side of the space key.

if you give your password in a terminal, it does not give any feedback. just type your password as you normally would and press return.

both these "problems" will occur on lubuntu 14.04 as well, nevertheless cascade9 is right.

1 members found this post helpful.

Ctrl + Alt + 2 is not a proper Linux keystroke! Is it what you use in Windows? The way to get "@" is AltGr + 2. You can find the keyboard driver file at /usr/share/X11/xkg/symbols/ca. It has entries like
key <AE02> {[ 2, quotedbl, at ]};
Which means that in the alphanumeric area (A), 5th row up (E), the second key (02) produces a "2", a double-quotation mark with Shift, and a @ with AltGr.
Similarly,
key <AD11> {[ dead_circumflex, dead_circumflex, bracketleft ]};
shows that the key after P gives you a combining circumflex, but a "[" with AltGr.

1 members found this post helpful.

Ctrl+Alt+n is a windows thing that let you add different symblos. I get around that by using a character map type of thing.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/30245...-cant-input-it

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gucharmap

Thank you very much. You were right on both counts.

could you mark this solved then?
others will benefit.

Thank you very much, David. I always used Crtl + Alt in Windows to get the special characters that I needed, but I didn't know that this wouldn't work in the Linux environment. Now I know that I should use instead the Alt Gr key to get them. By the way, the Alt Gr key also works fine in Windows but, ignorant me, I didn't know that or I didn't remember it.
Bruno

Thank you, cascade9. I didn't want to upgrade before I pinpointed whta was the trouble with my keyboard. Now that I know there was nothing wrong with it, I have already updated my version of Lubuntu and my computer is working fine.
Bruno