Change layout in Xubuntu 11.10

Question

Keyboard layout

Xubuntu 11.10 proved to be an excellent solution for a netbook. Speed, ease, flexibility in those places where you need and where you want. One annoyance is the layout change.

I'm used to Ctrl + Shift, here by default Alt + Shift. I'm used to the English language by default, Russian comes out here.

There is no such thing in the settings menu. I tried to pretend to be a coolhacker and climb in the configs - nothing happened. I installed xfce4-xkb-plugin, but there is a popular problem with it - it does not save settings after reboot (the developers admit this sin, they promise to fix it in the next versions).

And while the developers are writing a new version of the plugin, Canonical is working on a new toothbrush, no one seems to care about my modest problems. Perhaps someone has come across this problem and managed to solve it?

Answer 1

Eureka! You can use setxkbmap to solve the problem, but with a little trick.
I have tried commands like:

setxkbmap -layout 'us,ru,ua' -option 'grp:lctrl_lshift_toggle'

but this did not help - the layout was still changing the alt-shift. The following command suggested the cause of the problem:

setxkbmap -print

It turned out that the option to switch by control-shift is written into the configs, but after it the alt-shift option still remains, which overrides it. A slightly crooked solution came to mind, which, nevertheless, works:

#!/bin/sh
# для очистки всех опций
setxkbmap -layout 'us,ru,ua' -option ''
# для добавления опции переключения по нужным клавишам
setxkbmap -layout 'us,ru,ua' -option 'grp:lctrl_lshift_toggle'

Answer 2

The lowest-level option is xkb , a keyboard configuration at the X server level. You can also try some third party switch like kbdd .

Answer 3

I also use Xubuntu and met the problem. I am using the standard xfce4-xkb-plugin. At me it saves settings sometimes after reboot. Well, for greater reliability, I added the following lines to the end of the /etc/default/console-setup file: I also made an alias so that the setting would work immediately:
XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us,ru"
XKBVARIANT=",winkeys"
XKBOPTIONS="grp:lctrl_lshift_toggle,compose:ralt,grp_led:scroll"
setxkbmap -model pc105 -layout "us,ru" -variant ",winkeys" -option "grp:lctrl_lshift_toggle,compose:ralt,grp_led:scroll"

Answer 4

Can be done much easier (no console). To do this, go to Settings Manager -> Panel -> Items and add Keyboard Layouts.
After that, go to the properties of the newly added element (left mouse click -> Properties) and set the desired settings.
That's all.