Quick question about keyboard characters

KMCarpenter · 03-30-2017, 07:39 PM

Hello.

On my system, in the GUI, @ shows up as @ like it's supposed to. It even works fine in the GUI terminal. But when I switch over to an actual terminal (Ctrl + Alt + F#), @ shows up as ". How can I fix this?

frankbell · 03-30-2017, 09:20 PM

I don't have an answer, but I have an idea for a diagnostic to get started with.

Run the locale command in a terminal under the GUI, then run the same command in the actual console, and check for differences in the output, particularly as regards the LANG setting.

I'd be mildly taken aback if there were, but it will take only seconds to check.

KMCarpenter · 03-30-2017, 09:26 PM

Both the same....

Quote:

LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

frankbell · 03-30-2017, 10:23 PM

Drat.

Well that rules out that the desktop environment was somehow invoking a different LANG setting from the raw GUI.

This is curious and I've made myself a note to do some testing tomorrow, but keep in mind that something might come up. In the meantime, if this is a desktop and if you have a spare keyboard, try swapping out the keyboard to make sure it isn't some keyboard weirdness. I do not think it could be, but it's worth ruling out (see my siggy).

KMCarpenter · 03-30-2017, 10:29 PM

I have all Cisco keyboards... I swapped one out and got the same results.

frankbell · 03-30-2017, 10:42 PM

Even if they are all Ciscos, I'd expect that, if they were different models, the test should have turned up something. I wouldn't have expected it to be the keyboard in any event, but that's another possible cause ruled out.

For a moment, I thought that xev might help, but xev requires X.

By the way, what distro/version/desktop are you using?

KMCarpenter · 03-30-2017, 10:54 PM

It's the newest stable release of Raspbian

frankbell · 03-30-2017, 11:04 PM

I don't have Raspbian for testing, but I will test on what I have and report back.

Do you have problems with any other characters?

KMCarpenter · 03-30-2017, 11:08 PM

To my knowledge... this is the only problem... I went down all the shift characters and they all worked except for @

Shadow_7 · 03-30-2017, 11:30 PM

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

AFAIK, the raspbian defaults to a british keyboard layout. Pipe [|] and number [#] are not what they should be with that layout. Although it is odd that your GUI differs for it's layout.

GazL · 03-31-2017, 05:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shadow_7

Although it is odd that your GUI differs for it's layout.

Not all that odd. Keyboard layout for the gui is set in xorg.conf, though some desktop environments may override this with their own settings, keyboard layout for the console is usually set from a loadkeys command somewhere in one of the rc.* scripts (and will vary with distro). I've no idea what systemd does.

And yes, this sounds very much like a uk <> us layout mismatch.

frankbell · 03-31-2017, 10:23 AM

I have not been able to duplicate this on Mageia v. 5 (Zareason laptop), Slackware --Current (Zareason desktop), or Debian v. 8 (Lenovo graphics tablet).

I did learn that if you try ALT-CTRL-BackSpace (I know, it was stupid, but mistakes are how I learn

) in a VM, the Host OS intercepts the command and closes X.

Shadow_7 · 03-31-2017, 12:42 PM

I did that during the rackspace challenge at a texas linuxfest. I don't normally do VMs as all my machines are already resource starved with 2GB ram or less. A lot of distros these days actually disable the Cntrl+Alt+Backspace option to close X. Which is why I found it surprising that it worked in that scenario.

One odd thing I do is use Xdmx to lock several Xephyr windows together so I can have a terminal with a LOT of $LINES. Which helps when coding as I can keep my 1080p screen orientated at 16:9. Anyway, with Xephyr you can lock your input to the Xephyr window with Cntrl+Shift, perhaps that works for a VM to. And toggle out of it with the same. When locked, your inputs do NOT go to your host X environment. I really need to make that youtube video, but my blog on here outlines the process. With a neep font at 6x13 you could have 105x246 characters in an xterm with a fair amount of padding. Which should be good enough to show the full ps output in top if you're not running a server. And the full manpage on one screen for quite a few things.

Peverel · 03-31-2017, 12:44 PM

You don't say what distribution you are using. but run this through Google

"linux change keyboard language"

and see if any of the answers fit.

DavidMcCann · 03-31-2017, 01:19 PM

You've obviously got the USA driver instead of the UK one. Sometimes confusion occurs because the X driver is called gb but the console one is called uk! The command
loadkeys uk
should get the correct settings. If it does, you can make a permanent change with
dpkg-reconfigure console-data
I don't know if that still works in the age of systemd; if it doesn't, see this
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/...ion_in_console