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Accepted
Wilf
Asked: 2014-02-19 07:02:40 +0800 CST

How to automatically select the right keyboard layout? - with only one keyboard layout

  • 772

On my laptop, I only have one keyboard layout:
Menu in top panel showing keyboard layout

Now, if I login in to Ubuntu 13.10, and press the # key, I get \.
Similar things occur for other keys - \ become <. UK layout features don't work, as £ becomes #.

But if I open the settings, or select the layout in the top bar of Unity, despite it being the only layout, it does not cause the above problems.

Here is also the window of Keyboard Settings: Keyboard Settings

The layout seems to show correctly (but this is after opening Keyboard Settings, after which it seems alright....): Keyboard layout

I hope to find an answer myself, but I'll see if anyone else has any ideas about this? I haven't had this problem elsewhere... and is a tad irritating when programming.

The laptop in question is Lenovo G570 with Ubuntu 13.10 + Fedora 20 dual boot (I haven't had any problems in Fedora) - Model 4334

keyboard

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I found the answer in dconf - I changed org.gnome.desktop.input-sources sources from:

    [('xkb', 'gb')]

    to

    [('gb', 'xkb')]

    This works very nicely, but seems to have killed the Keyboard Settings:

    enter image description here

    Probably as I switched iBus and the other thing in a 'incorrect manner' - here is the description of the thing I edited from dconf-editor:

    Schema:

    org.gnome.desktop.input-sources

    Summary:

    List of input sources

    Description:

    List of input source identifiers available. Each source is specified as a tuple of 2 strings. The first string is the type and can be one of 'xkb' or 'ibus'. For 'xkb' sources the second string is 'xkb_layout+xkb_variant' or just 'xkb_layout' if a XKB variant isn't needed. For 'ibus' sources the second string is the IBus engine name. An empty list means that the X server's current XKB layout and variant won't be touched and IBus won't be used.

    But as it works still, I'll leave it until it explodes or something.

    Update:

    Setting it to this also works:

    [('ibus', 'gb')]

    Weird.

    • 2

  2. I had a similar, very odd issue recently (also in 13.10), where suddenly one day it refused to acknowledge I was using the UK layout (it was trying to force the US one on me, as it seems to be with you - \ instead of #, etc.).

    The fix was also slightly odd, but could well sort this out in a similar way. Essentially, go to the Text Entry settings menu as you did already in the question, and add a new layout by clicking the "+" button in the bottom-left (any layout will do - we'll be taking it away later.) Then, remove "English (UK)" from the list by selecting it and clicking the minus button.

    Then, re-add "English (UK)" using the same method as before, and remove the dummy layout you added before. In my case, this seemed to remind the computer of the layout it should actually be using, and it has worked fine ever since.

    • 1