[SOLVED] Keyboard oddities and UTF-8.

cibonato · Last edited by cibonato on Fri Feb 18, 2011 12:14 am; edited 2 times in total

Ladies and gentlemen, I think I've done something wrong when was trying to set UTF-8 support in my system.

My first language is Portuguese (Brazilian) but I live in a country where people speak Spanish (Uruguay), so the point is that I have a Spanish (Spain) keyboard and all the programs in Portuguese. I'm using Spanish (Spain) layout because in this one there's the "ç" key, so things is more easier.

Well, the problem is that after following Gentoo guide instructions to set UTF-8, the keyboard got crazy. The most annoying thing is the AltGr key that don't work any more. This means I can't type #, @, etc... This is the guide I followed [1] and I've checked it twice.

When the system is booting up I see this message:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Minor things: it's just LANG, not LC_LANG and it should be enough, no need for LC_ALL.
Are you sure that locale exist for you ? Perhaps when you limited the number of generated locales, you've made a typo.

Does the keyboard problem regard console or X ?

cibonato · Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 8:58 pm Post subject:

Well, first of all I have to apologize myself for an inaccuracy: there's no LC_LANG variable, it was a mistake. It's just LANG.

Yes, I'm sure there is pt_BR.UTF-8 locale. Initially this system was running pt_BR.ISO-8859-1 and I decided to change it to pt_BR.UTF-8. If I am not wrong. there should be few relation between the keyboard map and the locale. Off course, if the locale do not support Euro sign, so I should not expect it to be available.

The time I double checked [1] I was sure there's no typo. And last, the problem is just related with X (xorg). In console it is OK.

Greetings.

[1] - http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/utf-8.xml
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VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Well, the console vs X part you should have mentioned right from the start.
It's probably incorrect settings in your xorg.conf (or one of *.conf snippets).

Let's take it slowly: what does 'locale' print in a terminal ?

A minor note though: parts of that guide are ridiculously outdated.

cibonato · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2011 1:00 am Post subject:

This is what I get when I type locale on console:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

If locale doesn't print any warnings on its own, either you need to check /etc/env.d for old entries or search root's environment files - it's a bit strange the warning happens on boot only.

In any recent xorg-server with standard setting, such xorg.conf block gets effectively ignored.
In effect, your keyboard layout doesn't get set.
Pastebin your xorg.conf, if you can't figure it out with just all of the relevant forum threads and xorg-server upgrade guides.

Check if 'locale charmap' does return 'UTF-8'.

Was that part on vim about console or X ? Does "??" in that specific case stand for two characters or more ?

v_andal · Guru Joined: 26 Aug 2008 Posts: 541 Location: Germany

Did you make sure that pt_BR.UTF-8 is really created? Try 'locale -a' in terminal and see if this locale is available in the list.

Also, have you tried to use?

Option "XkbOptions" "compose:ralt"

s_bernstein · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2011 9:00 am Post subject:

Call genlocale to regenerate all your locales

cibonato · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2011 10:39 am Post subject:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Have you made any significant changes to /etc/vim/vimrc or have your own ~/.vimrc ?

What did you put into that locale-gen file ? es_ES.utf8@euro is pure silliness.

cibonato · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2011 11:42 am Post subject:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Let me rephrase that: paste the content of that file.

UTF-8@euro is pointless - in 8bit locales @euro usually meant latin1->latin15, with utf8 that's redundant.

cibonato · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2011 9:19 pm Post subject:

Here it is:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

I've meant /etc/locale.gen, but as you attached this one...
Any reason for '"AllowEmptyInput" "false"' ?

cibonato · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2011 10:31 pm Post subject:

This is /etc/locale.gen. You'll see that es_ES.utf-8@euro is no longer in this file.

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Any reason for not simply using evdev driver ?

cibonato · Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2011 11:20 am Post subject:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

What I'm trying to say is that unless you have a very good reason not to,
you should drop 'Option "AllowEmptyInput" "false"' line and just use InputClass
- on general, it makes a cleaner xorg.conf.

v_andal · Guru Joined: 26 Aug 2008 Posts: 541 Location: Germany

In other places people recommend not to set LC_ALL in order to avoid " setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (pt_BR.UTF-8 ) " error. The http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/guide-localization.xml also recommends not to set it. Set only specific variables that you really need.

The Xorg configuration should be OK as it is. Well, if it worked before switching to UTF-8, then there's no reason for it not to work now. I mentioned about XkbOption only because I didn't know that you set it via gnome.

cibonato · Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2011 4:46 pm Post subject:

cibonato · Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 11:43 pm Post subject:

Well, I think things are getting better. Right now this is xorg.conf:

cibonato · Posted: Fri Feb 18, 2011 12:14 am Post subject:

Done!

I had to set Right Control as compose key and this problem is solved.

Thank you so much.
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