Finally. I’ve picked up my US keyboard for the ASUS UL20A today. Installation was surprisingly easy, with no warranty-void-if-removed stickers anywhere. Time to play again with keyboard settings. Default layout became US International (with dead keys). I kept Hungarian (qwerty) as well for the occasional őŐűŰ. And now to the most interesting part, the Layout Options.
Ctrl Key Position, Make CapsLock an additional Ctrl.
Hurraaaaah!!!! The bloody CapsLock is eliminated at last!
Key(s) to Change Layout, Both Shift keys together.
A combination of keys far away from each other, never normally used together.
Use keyboard LED to show alternative layout. CapsLock.
Of course. As the bastard is dead, I can use its LED to indicate if the Hungarian layout is active.
This incredible abundance of keyboard settings is amazing. A good reason alone to choose Linux over Windows.
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
