subogero linux blog

As I’ve mentioned my laptop came with a Hungarian keyboard, which will be changed to a US version as soon as the part arrives (6 weeks). In the meantime I’m trying very hard to live with this one. I’ve learned to use the awkward Alt-Gr key to access trivial characters like backslash, tilde or square brackets.

But there are limits. The “qwertz” stuff. The swapped “z” and “y” keys. It’s an abomination. So I went to System/Preferences/Keyboard and I found an abundance of layout settings Windows users can’t even dream of. Of course there is a Hungarian “qwerty” layout. Many, actually. When you choose a layout you get an illustration of the entire keyboard. So it was not difficult to find variant “Hungary 102/qwerty/comma/Dead keys”.

However wonderful this nice GUI for keyboard settings is, it suffers from a general illness of Linux GUI programs. They are fantastic but, in the absence of enforced corporate QA, they never get finished. This one is not finished either. The “Apply System-wide” button has stopped working. So the login screen has been still using a “qwertz” layout.

Until now. But “Config Wizard” has solved it. All these GUIs are just smart config-file editors. But never as smart as a text editor. I guess that’s the main reason those GUIs are never finished. You develop them and, at 90% completness, you realise any text-editor is better.

Anyway, this is the location of the keyboard layout config files:

User:

~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd/%gconf.xml

System-wide (login screen):

/etc/default/console-setup