How can I create a custom keyboard layout

[Landaro]

Hi there,

I would like to achieve the following:

I want to use a keyboard layout that is basically US international as that is what my physical keyboard looks like. Nonetheless I also occasionally need a couple of other characters which I would like to ahve available when holding the AltGr key (on my keyboard its labled only Alt to the right of the space bar, but the wiring should be the same from what I have worked out so far)

The addional charachter I want are the German umlauts (normal as well as capital) on 'a' 'o' and 'u' respectively, the sharp s on 's', the euro symbol on 'e' and the british pound symbol 'l'.

I have implemented this as a custom layout for windows (which is running on my machine as well) using some microsoft tool and I would like to achieve the same under Fedora 9

I have searched the web for a while which always lead back to a tutorial from 2004 but all files and directories mentioned there don't exist or look completely different on my installation.

This is probaly all related to the tool XKB so under this heading the following packages are installed on my system:

X.Org X11 libxkbfile runtime library
X.Org X11 xkb utilities

I hope that someone can give me some advice
Landaro

[DavidMcCann]

There two good ways to get extra characters.

The quickest, for most people, is to activate a Compose key. If you're using Gnome, enter the menu at System – Preferences – Hardware – Keyboard. Then, in the applet, chose Layout-options and Compose-key. Any of the Windows keys, or the Windows menu key would be a good choice.

Pressing (and releasing) Compose tells the computer that the next two key-strokes are a code for something else, so

A " gives Ä
e ' gives é
c = gives €
s s gives ß
L - gives £
- ( gives {
( ( gives [
c , gives ç

For further details, see
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Accented_Characters

You would obviously prefer to modify your keyboard layout to match your Windows one, so see
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/..._Keyboard_Maps

[openSauce]

Hi,

I'll ask my question in this thread since it's related, and it came up after following the instructions from http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/..._Keyboard_Maps provided above.

I've created a new keyboard mapping called gb-mine and placed it in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols (am running Fedora 8). I amended base.xml and base.lst as per the instructions, but when I go to the Gnome menu System -> Administration -> Keyboard, my new mapping isn't there. It does, however, correctly appear in the layouts, under System -> Preferences -> Hardware -> Keyboard. Is there something else I need to do to get it onto the key mappings menu?


In /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.xml:

   ...
    </layout>
    <layout>
      <configItem>
        <name>gb-mine</name>
        <shortDescription>GBme</shortDescription>
        <description>United Kingdom (My variant)</description>
      </configItem>
    </layout>
    <layout>
   ...

In /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst:

! layout
  ...
  gb              United Kingdom
  gb-mine         United Kingdom (My variant)
  ...

[DavidMcCann]

My new ones don't show in that menu either. But does it matter, if you can do everything you want from System - Preferences? Actually, System - Administration only offers a few of the default layouts, as well, so our new layouts are not creating the problem. There seems to be a thing with Gnome, where the same job is tackled in several different places (in this case there's also System Tools - Configuration Editor), not all of them offering the same facilities.