The impossibility of changing keyboards?

[raid517]

Hi, can anyone please tell me how to go about changing the keyboard layout in Xubuntu? I assume, since it's Debian that the process should be the same for any flavour of Debian and Xubuntu - hence why I am appealing to Debian - and other users also.

Here is a list of what I have tried so far:

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg (worked until reboot), kbd-config did nothing, dpkg-reconfigure console-data, went through configuration process - but had no end effect, I did 'setxkbmap gb' - but again, this didn't survive a reboot, I edited my xorg.conf file to read: "XkbLayout" to "gb", but once again, this worked only until a reboot. I also tried writing a little script with the following syntx:


#! /bin/sh

setxkbmap gb

exit 0

and pretty much adding this to every available spare slot on each run level - but again to no effect. (I have no idea if I got the script right though - as I know nothing about these kinds of things. (Although I did test it by running the script from the command line - and it worked without a hitch)

Can anyone suggest what might be going on and possibly how to fix it?

I wondered if perhaps GDM might have anything to do with it?

GJ

[ArgPirate]

Would you not just change the relevent section in your xorg.conf? Looks like mine is

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard1"
Driver "keyboard"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
Option "XkbOptions" "compose:rwin"
EndSection

So just change your XkbLayout. Ive never done this, this is just guess work.

[raid517]

Yes that would seem like the obvious answer, but as I mentioned I tried that I tried that too - but this still had no effect. (Again it only worked until I rebooted).

After each reboot my xorg.conf file gets automatically rewriten to revert to a german keyboard layout.

I have checked, triple checked and checked over and over that the permissions on xorg.conf are correctly set and that the changes are applied - but no matter what I do my xorg.conf file always gets rewriten after each reboot.

I've never ran into anything so odd before - which is why I wondered if GDM might somehow to be to blame? Again the keyboard layout works fine when I quit X.

GJ

[Sepero]

Three possible suggestions:

- Check to see if there is an option to change it in the XFCE or KDE Control center.
or
- Quick and Dirty: Edit the appropriate files, then change the permissions on them so they are only readable. (chmod 444)
or
- grep your startup files for words like "xorg.conf" or "XF86Config" find out how your files are getting changed. Then edit those files accordingly.

Perhaps someone has already solved this on the Xubuntu forums?

[raid517]

Yes grep did it. It was a script - the guy who made this distro had written a pretty much bullet proof script that checked in about six different locations (no joke!) for backup copies of xorg.conf and if it found any discrepancies it replaced the original with one of the back up copies, making it very difficult indeed for xorg.conf (and hence the keyboard layout) to be overwritten.

Why he did this is a complete mystery.

I guess it isn't important now - but I neglected to mention that I was doing this on an Xbox. (specifically because I was afraid that it might confuse people). However as it is pretty much just a regular PC (particularly when Linux is installed) that is probably quite irrelevant.

But anyway, thanks very much for all your kind suggestions! :)

GJ

[Sepero]

Yeah, I once had a problem similar to that about 3+ years ago. My problem wasn't so extreme though. I think it was on Debian or Slackware. I wasn't able to save a custom startup message in /etc/motd (messege of the day). There turned out to be a script that re-wrote the file at every boot. It was a hair pulling experience for me back then, because I still hadn't figured out many of the system in's&out's yet.