[CentOS] Keyboard layout switching bug: workaround?

Niki Kovacs

contact at kikinovak.net
Sat May 13 06:39:19 UTC 2006


Hi,

I'm an Austrian writer living in Montpezat (South France). I've been 100%
GNU/Linux for the past five years, and I recently switched from Slackware to
CentOS, for the sake of comfort. Overall impression: I like it!

I have a few problems to solve yet in my migration effort, mostly minor
annoyances. First things first.

I need three different keyboard layouts: de, fr_CH and fr. I'm used to toggle
between these. Now this doesn't seem to work with CentOS 4.3. (My system is in
french, so I have to translate Menu entries back to english, I don't know if
they will be accurate...). Anyway.

Applications -> Preferences -> Keyboard opens the keyboard configuration window.
There's a section called "Agencement" in french, guess this will be "layout".
When I try to add a layout, I get the following error message: (again,
translating back from french)

---
XKB configuration error during activation. Probably an internal X server error.
...
---

I close the error message window. The new layout seems to be added. But when I
try to toggle keyboard layouts (default: pressing [Alt] + [AltGr]), I get
something that could be best described as a martian layout. Lots of nonsense.

Now how could I fix this?

When using XFCE with Slack, before the days of a keyboard switching plugin, I
just manually defined some commands like 'setxkbmap [some options] -layout
fr_CH', and then assigned these to some keyboard shortcuts. Is this a viable
solution here? Or what would you recommend?

This is rather annoying, since I type text in three languages (I also work as a
translator), and I'm a bit stuck here.

Any suggestions?

Niki Kovacs




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