> I helped a local school set up a Linux computer lab. The setup uses X- > terminals (netboot, NFS and all that stuff) on Debian unstable. > Everything seems to work perfectly but for one "small" problem - > changing keyboard layouts simply doesn't work. Well - in fact even the > layout specified in XF86Config-4 doesn't work and it falls back to US. I > know nothing about debugging X down at the protocol level, so I will > give you a bunch of symptoms in case somebody can help:
Are these running on PPC? Even if they are, you might have more luck on the X or Gnome lists (http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/ or http://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome/). That said ... > * if you issue a command like "setxkbmap us" you only get an error > (Error loading keyboard description) What do you get from `setkxbmap -print` ? > * if you pipe the output to xkbcomp like this: > "setxkbmap -print us | xkbcomp - 192.168.0.222:0" > it works... You say above that the keyboard is a US map. What map do you want? And does it work like this: `setxkbmap -print us | xkbcomp - :0` ? > * On the client (X server) side, xkbcomp seems to work on its own > * "xmodmap xmodmap /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.ee" also works Yeah, xmodmap is totally different. It'd be better to get XKB working. > * As the school uses the GNOME desktop, they also get a bunch of errors > from gnome-settings-daemon that tries to change the keyboard layout > according to some gconf keys. As I understand, GNOME does not use > setxkbmap and friends, but goes through it's own libxklavier library. There are some bugs with xklavier, especially with X terminals. From one of the X terminals, can you see /etc/X11/xkb? If not, this is the cause of your troubles. What makes it hard is that there is almost no logging XKB problems from within X. Frank