Xorg - zap & keyboard

[JRD]

Hi !
I found two things who annoyed me. Fortunately I found a way to kinda resolve them:
- I cannot figure how to zap xorg (i.e. ctrl+alt+backspace to relaunch X). There is no more any xorg.conf so I cannot figure how to do. I tried adding option "dontzap" "false" in xorg.conf but it didn't work. I found while searching on Internet that a new combination keys has been set : alt+print_screen+k and it works
- I'm french and use a french keyboard. But the "fr" layout only provide a poor keyboard map. The "oss" variant is much better (I don't know what it isn't the default). This could be change in XFCE after login, but I prefer my system to directly use the correct mapping/layout. Especially because I don't want to do the manipulation on every account. Since xorg.conf is not used anymore for keybaord layout, HAL is in charge of it.
To modify it, edit "/etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi" and change the line about xkb.layout and xkb.variant to this :

Code: Select all

<merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">fr</merge>
<merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string">oss</merge>

Restart hal and restart X (in fact gdm):

Code: Select all

service restart hald
service restart gdm

And you're done.

Could a application (ncurses or X or both) could be set to modify these settings ? Could be better at installation process also

[gapan]

Hi !
I found two things who annoyed me. Fortunately I found a way to kinda resolve them:
- I cannot figure how to zap xorg (i.e. ctrl+alt+backspace to relaunch X). There is no more any xorg.conf so I cannot figure how to do. I tried adding option "dontzap" "false" in xorg.conf but it didn't work. I found while searching on Internet that a new combination keys has been set : alt+print_screen+k and it works

The xorg devs appear to want to disable that functionality completely or at least to hide it as much as possible.

- I'm french and use a french keyboard. But the "fr" layout only provide a poor keyboard map. The "oss" variant is much better (I don't know what it isn't the default).

It isn't the default because nobody ever asked about it!
I could set it as the default in future versions of keyboardsetup. But is it true for all french users that they would prefer that? What about alternate french keymaps? Apart from fr, there are: fr-latin1, fr-latin9, fr-pc, fr_CH-latin and fr_CH.

[JRD]

- fr-pc is the same as the one on Windows
- fr-latin1 is the default and provide more characters using altgr+key
- fr-latin9 is a modified fr-latin1 with more characters and better placed
- oss is a modified fr-latin9 with more characters and better placed (exemple, the non-breaking-space was misplaced on fr-latin9 which then provide some problems when typing code or commands)
- fr-CH and fr-CH-latin I don't know, it's for the swiss keyboard with is physically different from the french keyboard.

Some images :
fr-latin1
fr-latin9
fr-oss (old, not in Xorg anymore, but we find image layout everywhere on the web)
fr-oss (actual)
I didnt't find keymap for fr-pc or fr-CH. Normally Swiss people use ch-fr keymap.
For french people, I don't see any reason not to use the fr-oss keymap...but other opinion could be usefull

[thenktor]

I found while searching on Internet that a new combination keys has been set : alt+print_screen+k and it works

Thanks! I was wondering about that, too

[Akuna]

For french people, I don't see any reason not to use the fr-oss keymap...but other opinion could be usefull

Didn't know about that one, but according to what you showed, it definitely seems that it should be the default one. Let's go for it.

[EricC]

Hi !
I found while searching on Internet that a new combination keys has been set : alt+print_screen+k and it works

Thanks for the new key combination, I didn't see that (which probably means it was right in front of me) when I was searching for a solution.

I ended up using the Hal method as described in the Arch Wiki:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xor ... 27t_exit_X