keymap customization
Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2009 3:50 am
A bit of background:
Running Gloria, Xfce edition, the brand new shiny release; was running the RC before. I'm running into difficulties configuring my keyboard correctly and figured this was the best place to ask.
I have a (US) Mac keyboard, which I usually let the system approximate as type "105-key PC" though the key count is actually 109 and so this approximation fails to detect a few. Now, I'm dual-booting my system, Mac and Linux, and I'd like the key combos for basic functions (e. g. copy-paste) to be the same, so I want to swap the "Win" keys (Apple keys) with the Control keys, functionality-wise. (Don't see the point in having four Control keys, so I'd like to remap the default ones to something else.) Furthermore, I type in Spanish and German often enough that I want ready access to international characters, and I'd really like to use the Mac-style key combos for that because while the default configuration for PC105 works, it takes considerably more effort to type an ñ or anything with an umlaut than I like, and the Mac setup's a lot easier and doesn't require me to retrain myself. Finally, I want to change the function of the Capslock key to a second Escape.
Now, the problems:
First, obviously, the GUI tool is useless for most of this. It lets me pick PC105-US-Mac, but obviously doesn't include such finicky options as the position of the Control key. So I have to edit configuration files manually, or hack up a shell script to set the options I need -- no problem, right? Except I found two completely different configuration files governing my personal configuration alone, and editing them didn't seem to make any difference. Nor does xorg.conf any more, of course. Further, setxkbmap (combined with hacking up the Control-swapping in a file in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ so as to be able to set it) doesn't change anything, as shown:
And then any hacks I had working appear to stop doing so, though they do that periodically for no good reason that I can see anyway so I'm not sure what the actual cause of the failure is. The best I can make out is that the "evdev" alluded to in this error message is something to do with hardware detection, but I haven't determined what I have to mess with to override it.
I also tried xmodmap (no apparent effect) and creating a new keymap (seemed to work at first, then broke everything, presumably because I did something weird with the formatting somewhere; I've since reinstalled the operating system.)
The keyboard configuration battle has been the last major problem in my Linux-on-Mac experience, and has been ongoing for a long time, so I'm really tired of this. I did have it working under Felicia, though!
Running Gloria, Xfce edition, the brand new shiny release; was running the RC before. I'm running into difficulties configuring my keyboard correctly and figured this was the best place to ask.
I have a (US) Mac keyboard, which I usually let the system approximate as type "105-key PC" though the key count is actually 109 and so this approximation fails to detect a few. Now, I'm dual-booting my system, Mac and Linux, and I'd like the key combos for basic functions (e. g. copy-paste) to be the same, so I want to swap the "Win" keys (Apple keys) with the Control keys, functionality-wise. (Don't see the point in having four Control keys, so I'd like to remap the default ones to something else.) Furthermore, I type in Spanish and German often enough that I want ready access to international characters, and I'd really like to use the Mac-style key combos for that because while the default configuration for PC105 works, it takes considerably more effort to type an ñ or anything with an umlaut than I like, and the Mac setup's a lot easier and doesn't require me to retrain myself. Finally, I want to change the function of the Capslock key to a second Escape.
Now, the problems:
First, obviously, the GUI tool is useless for most of this. It lets me pick PC105-US-Mac, but obviously doesn't include such finicky options as the position of the Control key. So I have to edit configuration files manually, or hack up a shell script to set the options I need -- no problem, right? Except I found two completely different configuration files governing my personal configuration alone, and editing them didn't seem to make any difference. Nor does xorg.conf any more, of course. Further, setxkbmap (combined with hacking up the Control-swapping in a file in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ so as to be able to set it) doesn't change anything, as shown:
Code: Select all
setxkbmap -v 10 -layout us
Setting verbose level to 10
locale is C
Warning! Multiple definitions of keyboard layout
Using command line, ignoring X server
Applied rules from evdev:
model: pc105
layout: us
options: compose:menu,compose:ralt,numpad:mac,ctrl:mac_swap,capslock:escape,compose:menu,compose:ralt,numpad:mac,ctrl:mac_swap,capslock:escape,lv3:ralt_switch
Trying to build keymap using the following components:
keycodes: evdev+aliases(qwerty)
types: complete+numpad(mac)
compat: complete
symbols: pc+us+inet(evdev)+level3(ralt_switch)+compose(ralt)+compose(menu)
geometry: pc(pc105)
I also tried xmodmap (no apparent effect) and creating a new keymap (seemed to work at first, then broke everything, presumably because I did something weird with the formatting somewhere; I've since reinstalled the operating system.)
The keyboard configuration battle has been the last major problem in my Linux-on-Mac experience, and has been ongoing for a long time, so I'm really tired of this. I did have it working under Felicia, though!