Keyboard settings for xdm
 

I just installed Debian sarge on a Dell laptop (Inspiron 2200). It's mostly ok, except for some tuning and settings I still have to manage. One of them is the keyboard. I have a Swiss French keyboard which is recognized without problems by the command line. When I tried to start X manually (i.e. startx), I discover the setting was actually azerty (while the Swiss French keyboard is qwertz). This wasn't a big deal since xkeycaps helped me find the right key mapping and I saved it in a file which is loaded by xmodmap (in .bashrc) everytime I log in.

Now, here is the problem. X needs me to log in to recognize the keyboard. So if I use xdm to login (which I would like to do), xdm uses the azerty keyboard settings. My questions are:

- Why is it so? If the prompt is set to qwertz, it means that it most be some general setting.

- How and where can I set the keyboard (which config file or files) once and for all such that every application or package I use will use the same mapping, namely qwertz?

Thanks!

Within your xorg.conf, is there not an option to declare keyboard mappings? For example, my console would be UK, but not in X11 until I set my inputdevices section to be:

Yes indeed there is ( I just didn't think of checking there...). Since I am using Xfree86, I changed XF86.Config-4 accordingly:
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "fr-ch/latin1"

and then it works!

Thanks a lot!

Since you are using X-server, the general command to reset the X settings is:

#dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

It will remember the last settings you gave. Glad it works. You might consider gathering info on the rest of your hardware (monitor, mouse, etc.) and giving more detailed settings for them, too.

See the sticky "Debian Configuration Post-Install" at the top of this forum for more good info.

Meilleures salutations de Zurich ;)

Glad it worked! As pointed out by the previous poster, dpkg-reconfigure can be used instead, but this fires up the whole configuration for xfree86 (didn't realise you hadn't moved to xorg), which is a bit overkill for simply changing the keymap IMHO if everything else is working fine (which seems to be the case).

Enjoy being able to login properly :)

He didn't move to xorg: "Since I am using Xfree86, I changed XF86.Config-4 accordingly."

Manually editing XF86Config-4 is a fine way to make changes. (Make sure you keep this file thoroughly backed up.) However, my thought was that running dpkg-reconfigure would show him some of the other settings he could optimize.

Thanks for your comments. I actually knew about the
#dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
command (I used it to configure X for my graphics card since I had to change the driver), but that wasn't the problem here, only the keyboard in a very specific way (for xdm) was going crazy and I was going anyway for a manual edit, I just didn't remember which file it was... :-)

No offense, but I am a girl... :-)

Thanks for all your input (both of you!)