I finally decided to try/"switch to" slackware current. I grabbed an ISO image (26/04/2019) and installed from a DVD. After fiddling a bit with UEFI and GPT installation went as expected and took a few minutes because I don't install either tex or kde. The former I install from a texlive DVD and the latter from Alien Bob's ktown. During the installation I selected the Portuguese keymap as usual but I didn't test it, hitting 1 (the "accept when test is done" key), by assuming that the keyboard map was ok, as it usually is! However, when I logged into KDE I was unable to change the default
us keyboard layout to a
pt (Portuguese) layout! No flag/label appeared on the taskbar although I had the two layouts selected in KDE's settings. I changed to the stock XFCE but the problem persisted!
An inspection of
/etc/X11/xkb/symbols showed that the
pt file was somehow damaged. A regular
setxkbmap command returned an error for
pt but not for other layouts (such as the
sp,
us or
fr)
Code:
# setxkbmap -layout pt
Error loading new keyboard description
# setxkbmap -layout es
# setxkbmap -layout us
# setxkbmap -layout fr
Replacing the
pt file with the one that come with slackware64 14.2 solved the problem. The settings' windows of XFCE and Alien's KDE5 are now able to change the keyboard layout in X and in KDE5 a small flag allows me to change the layout on the fly. Regular text editors like
kate work correctly.
However, the problem is also present on the console. I usually boot on runlevel 3 and do a
startx from there. But if I stay on the console and work with
vi,
vim or even
nano, most of the dead keys do not work or produce strange results depending on the editor. For example typing '~' and 'a' does not echo an 'ã' but a regular 'a' without the tilde! Typing a 'ç' followed by any other character will echo a 'ç ' (a cedilla with a space) followed by the other character. This behavior is somehow reproducible using
vi on a
terminal in X. Surprisingly, in a X terminal, either
vim or
nano work flawlessly! I tried to replace the corresponding Portuguese files in
/usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty with the ones supplied by slackware64 14.2 with no success...
Just for the record I use a regular 'US' locale and avoid internationalization like the plague!
Code:
bash-5.0$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
