Ubuntu – Keyboard layout changed. How and why

kdekeyboard-layoutUbuntux11

Yesterday, I upgraded my kernel (to 3.5.0-19-generic), rebooted, and had to reinstall my video drivers to get full resolution. (After upgrading the kernel, the resolution always goes to 640×480, until I reinstall the drivers in Console Login).

Now that I'm back in KDE (I didn't notice if it had changed in the Console Login), my keyboard layout has changed to the US format, so, for example Shift+2 prints @ instead of ".

In KDE's System Settings -> Input Devices -> Keyboard -> Layouts, it seems to show the correct settings:

Map=gb, Layout="English (UK)", Variant="English (UK, extended WinKeys), Label="gb".

That's fine. I changed it and changed it back, and nothing has changed; it's still using the US layout.

After a little googling, I found that there are X server settings, which I've found in /etc/default/keyboard. I've never edited this file before and its last modification (according to ls -l) was a month ago. But in there, XKBLAYOUT="us". It also says:-

# If you change any of the following variables and X is configured to
# use this file, then the changes will become visible to X only if udev
# is restarted.  You may need to reboot the system.

I need to reboot? Seriously?

Any idea what changed my keyboard layout, and/or how can I prevent this from happening again? Why don't the KDE settings take precedence?

UPDATE:
This must have been some sort of freak occurrence. Some of KDE's keyboard shortcuts I had configured, weren't working either. Changing XKBLAYOUT to "uk", and rebooting changed everything back to normal.

Best Answer

The KDE keyboard layouts seemed to not work when kded was not running. Restarting the kdm service got it back up and running, but I'm not sure why it wasn't running in the first place... To kick-start kded without rebooting the whole system, log out of KDE, and log in to a Console Session. Then run:-

sudo service kdm restart

This can be done when logged into KDE, but you'll be automatically and abruptly logged out.

Related Solutions

Keyboard layout change indicator

I didn't change my keyboard layout very often, but when i do it, i use (for exemple) :

setxkbmap fr

There's also an option to show the current layout of your keyboard :

setxkbmap -query

result :

rules:      evdev
model:      pc105
layout:     fr
options:    terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

Considering this, you could do something with the notify-send command to send the layout as a notification. Something like this :

notify-send $(setxkbmap -query | grep layout)

How to get current keyboard layout from the command line

The reason you didn't find a solution is that there isn't one. There is no such thing as “the current keyboard layout”, if by this you mean something like “US QWERTY layout”. The keyboard layout doesn't have to be any particular predefined layout. The only way to describe it unambiguously is to dump the whole set of mappings (which you can do with xkbcomp :0 -).

You can find out which layout is configured in this or that configuration interface. All that will tell you is which layout is configured in that particular interface. It won't tell you whether this layout is current. The user might have used a different interface to change the layout, or might have set a completely custom keymap with a tool like xmodmap or xkbcomp.

The output you get from setxkbmap -query is as close as possible. It gets information from the X server, so you don't run into the problem of configuration files that may or may not have been applied. However, there are two ways to tell the X server to change the keyboard layout: by giving a layout name (and options), or by setting individual keys. If setxkbmap -query says us, it means that the last time somebody successfully asked the X server to load a specific layout, the request was to load the us layout. But if there was a subsequent request to change the configuration of individual keys, the layout may now be completely different.

Nobody is doing anything wrong. It's just that there's no concept of “current layout” in the system in general, because the keyboard layout doesn't have to be a predefined layout.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Keyboard layout change indicator

How to get current keyboard layout from the command line

Related Question