Hello,

I have been using IceWM under openSUSE 10.0 for about a month now and I am really happy with it. However, today I had to do a translation job and I came across the problem of switching keyboard layouts. I tried to google the problem, but none of the solutions was for IceWM.

Can anybody give me a clue as to how this switching between 2 layouts is done?

Thank you, guys.

icewm uses icewmconf or something like that. i'm not sure if you can change the keyboard with it though.

otherwise try
loadkeys fr
to change to french.

Take a look at
man loadkeys

Thank you, bosewicht.

However, I don't use any config tool with IceWM. I do it directly from the config files and there I couldn't find anything to configure the keyboard layouts.

I tried loadkeys but I only get the following message that I don't quite understand.

Loading /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/ru1.map.gz
Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console.

Any other ideas?

OK, problem solved. A dude at LXer pointed to in the right direction.


I used KDE's xkb app to get the necessary layouts and created a new entry in IceWM's keys file looking like this:

key "Ctrl+Alt+1" -setxkbmap -model toshiba_s3000 -layout us -variant basic
key "Ctrl+Alt+2" -setxkbmap -model toshiba_s3000 -layout bg -variant phonetic

So now I can switch at will. The difficult part was to figure out that once switched to the bg layout it does not recognize the characters, so using the numbers ("ctrl+shift+number" instead of "ctrl+shift+letter") was a solution.