Ubuntu – Change keyboard layout using Cyryllic character

keyboard-layoutlubuntux11

I'm using Lubuntu 11.10. I tried the keyboard layout applet from lxpanel but it does not work and I don't know why.

I can change the layout to Russian using

$ setxkbmap ru

and it works! Nice! But the problem is: how to set it back to br using the Russian characters? That is, what should I type on a Russian keyboard to get the same result as

$ setxkbmap br

Best Answer

This is, as I discovered some time ago, tricky business with the Russian layout :) - but tricky only because you have cyrillic letters coming up in console and do not know the current keyboard shortcut to switch the layout. Good news is that everything set by setxkbmap will only persist till you logout, then defaults will come back on the next time. That is also why I prefer to get one of the keyboard switching applets working.

However in your case if you use:

localectl set-x11-keymap br,ru grp:alt_shift_toggle

or setxkbmap "br,ru" "grp:alt_shift_toggle"

you should be able to perform switching with Alt+Shift combination, despite not having a working applet. It should work with more than 2 layouts too. This will only persist until logout, however if you edit /etc/vconsole.conf - the changes will pesrist.

KEYMAP="br,ru"
KEYMAP_TOGGLE="grp:alt_shift_toggle"

However this will only work with systemd startup - like in Fedora (which I happen to use). Ubuntu 11.10 does not yet use systemd. In that case you can either edit xorg.conf or /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi but an easier solution would be to invoke setxkbmap as you start your x session:

in file ~/.xsessionrc

You put command:

setxkbmap "br,ru" "grp:alt_shift_toggle"

That should sort it for you.

Related Solutions

Changing one character in keyboard layout

After searching I have found this similar question, which solves part of my problem. There is still the problem with Alt-gr key, which is not working.

I will let this answer here for a while, for others to see the solution and then I will delete it as duplicate.

Custom keyboard layout without root

For some reason it works if you -print and pipe the output to xkbcomp:

setxkbmap \
    -I ~/.config/xkb/ \
    -rules evdev-local \
    -layout "my-us(mdvp)" \
    -print |
    xkbcomp -I ~/.config/xkb/ - "$DISPLAY"

I don’t think there is anything wrong with your layout. I tried setting it up with setxkbmap directly, but even with the -verbose option the output is not helpful:

Warning! Multiple definitions of rules file
         Using command line, ignoring X server
Warning! Multiple definitions of keyboard layout
         Using command line, ignoring X server
Trying to build keymap using the following components:
keycodes:   evdev+aliases(qwerty)
types:      complete
compat:     complete
symbols:    pc+my-us(mdvp)+inet(evdev)+terminate(ctrl_alt_bksp)
geometry:   pc(pc104)
Error loading new keyboard description

This is with the default verbose level. But even if I set it to 10, which is apparently the max level, it just outputs “locale is C” as well as where it tries to look for the rules file, in addition to the above. It does not output anything more about why it fails to load the keyboard description.

One of the reasons why I prefer to pipe to xkbcomp instead of just using setxkbmap is because the former seems to give better error messages.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Changing one character in keyboard layout

Custom keyboard layout without root

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