Using Several Keyboard Layouts

$Revision: 110 $

$Date: 2006-12-22 00:34:25 +0100 (Fr, 22 Dez 2006) $

Problem

You need to have several keyboard layouts available on your computer.

Solution

In openSUSE you may use the default configuration program sax2 to accomplish this task.

  1. Start the YaST Control Center, and select Hardware -> Graphics Card and Monitor.

  2. In the upcoming user interface, select Keyboard.

  3. All available keyboard layouts are presented in the box Additional Layouts. Find the needed layout in this table and activate the “Status” check box for this entry.

  4. Select the Options tab to define the way how your keyboard will be switched. There are many different possibilities to do that. For example, if you want to change the keyboard layout by pressing both shift keys, select the check box in front of Both Shift keys together change group.

  5. Click on OK to finish the configuration.

  6. To finally activate the settings, you have to restart Xorg. Either finish your session and restart Xorg, or simply do a reboot.

Discussion

The console of a computer is responsible for managing the available input and output resources. Although it is also possible to have applications translating the keyboard characters, or even desktop systems, that have this functionality, one can avoid many problems, when the console, in this case this is the application Xorg handles all the events. The correct keyboard is simply available for all running applications.

On the other hand, there might be a problem to this. The different keyboards are already available at login time. This means, that if you have the keyboard in a different mode than you expect, user name and password are likely to be wrong. Special care has to be taken to avoid this problem, for example by pressing some known key in the user name field.

For More Information

Find more information about configuring XKB at http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R6.9.0/doc/html/XKB-Config2.html#2.