I want to be able to type some sentences in Greek in KDE. I've successfully got the KDE keyboard switcher working, which is all fine. The only problem is that I can't figure out how to get accented characters. This works in Windows by typing apostrophe before the vowel you want an accent on, but this doesn't work on X. No other combinations of characters seem to work.

I've googled long and hard, but I can't seem to find any mention of how this is done. I suspect I'm searching for the wrong keywords, since there must be at least some Greek linux users having trouble out there.

The KDE keyboard switcher runs a command 'setxkbdmap', but I can't find any documentation on how this works (there are only 105 hits for it on Google?) Oddly enough I can execute this just fine from a prompt, but I can't find the executable in any of the directories in my path. I was hoping I could track it down and study the source code, but no luck.

On a more general point, I've found it very difficult to find any information about keyboard handling under X. If anyone has any good links I'd be glad to hear of them. Once I've got Greek sorted I'm going to have to tackle Chinese. :-)


My system is Mandrake 10.0, KDE 3.2, XFree86 4.3.

I eventually found the documentation for setxkbmap here, in case anyone is interested. Google works a lot better when you spell the term correctly.