Keyboard is swapping keys
 

I have a big question and a little question.

1. I'm running Linux SuSE 8.2 Personal and am having problems with my keyboard. It is set to English (US) which is correct, but some keys are swapped.

For instance Z & Y are swapped every time I start the OS. I have to go into the control center and accept the English setting if I wish for the keyboard to correct the aforementioned, and I also have problems with the following keys at each startup as well:

-
/
.

All that I have to do is accept the English setting and everything works fine - it's just that I shouldn't have to, right?

2. Also, what does "X" stand for? I see it everywhere - does it simply refer to a version of an OS?

Thanks,

Jamie

I'm not sure about the first question, but "X" stands for "X Window System," and is, in simple terms, the graphical part of Linux. It can be XFree86 or X.Org.

I see, thanks jrdioko.

And thanks for the links as well!

Now if I can just figure this keyboard issue out... :scratch:

Jamie

is it happening only in X, or in the terminal before starting X, too?

and what desktop are you using? kde i believe has some sort of keyboard configuration applet. there should be a flag in the taskbar system tray, you can right click and select a default keyboard. there's probably something similar in gnome. it sounds like what you have now is defaulting to german or something.

if you're not using kde/gnome, you can change the default keyboard in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. where it says Option "XkbLayout" "[country]", change the country to "us". not 100% sure b/c i've never had the problem, but that ought to do it, i think.

Thanks for the reply synaptical.

I will have to check to see if it is starting at the terminal.

I'm using the kde desktop. I don't see a flag in the taskbar, but I do see an icon with a British flag and a keyboard in YaST. That is where I always accept the English (US) layout. Funny thing is, I don't have to select it, I simply have to accept it - and then the keys behave normally. But it's really becoming a pain... having to do it every time I start SuSE.

I cannot find a fix for it at the SuSE site either. I may have to reinstall as I did have some issues with this particular install that had previously never occurred.

Jamie

there might be a yast configuration file with that option, i've never used yast. but a reinstall seems extreme to fix such a problem.

in kde, if there's no tray icon, then you can check in the control center applet. there are options somewhere in there to set both the default keyboard and the country. setting one or the other might fix your problem. i think they're under "regional" or "accessibility." you can also right click the taskbar and add the keyboard applet and access that part of it from there if you want.

sorry for such poor KDE advice from an XFCE4 user. :o you'd think with all the KDE users and how everyone raves about KDE someone would have a good answer for your question, but sometimes you just have to be patient and hope someone will chime in. i really hope you don't think you have to reinstall your whole system just to fix a problem like that, though.

gl

Once again, you were correct in your instructions - thank you.

The keys that were swapped still occur in the terminal, but are okay once SuSE loads. I have a 108-Key keyboard whose manufacturer isn't supported - that explains the swap. I wish that I could find a solution that would fix the problem at the terminal as well, but I won't get picky.

Thanks again!

Jamie

after doing a little research, i think the command to use is the loadkeys command (man loadkeys). so for example, if you wanted to switch to US qwerty keyboard, the command would be:

# loadkeys /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.map.gz

or it seems that with most of the common keymaps, you can just do loadkeys and the country code: loadkeys us, loadkeys uk, etc. i tried it with loadkeys dk and it changed to danish (it looked like), so that should work. :cool:


p.s. note that's only for in the console. in X it seems to be overridden by xorg.conf. but if you already have X/KDE going to US (or whatever you want) that should do it.