User Feedback :: DSL is exactly what I need except ONE thing !!!

Hi everyone

This is really a major issue for me to continue w/ DSL.

I love it running fine on an old Compaq Deskpro 199 Mhz, English language is OK for me.

BUT

I cannot go through the French Keyboard issue which is mandatory to send mails to (French) friends !!! I've read a lot of litterature. I know now that I should not go w/ iso 8859-1 which is more for Belgium.

I've tried fr-latin9, but I still cannot use the special sign letters (accentuated)

I've also tried
Ctrl+Alt+Back space
$ sudo loadkeys fr
$ startx
But still no accentuated letter

another forum recommended to go in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf to modifie the keyboard, but I couldn't find xorg.conf

why

???

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only French guy w/ this problem!!!

Again I LOVE your lite distro, everything's PERFECT for what I need (browsing on the net and read/write mails) BUT if I cannot operate the French Keyboard I'll have a real heartbreak to have to leave it unfortunatelly.

Can somebody help me?
By the way I belong to a French IT club, many people have old PCs, and I can tell you that if you help me to solve this Pb, a lot of guys will move to DSL very enthousiastically!!! I'll push them to do so.

Thx for your help

From your post it appears that you have only tried one french keyboard map.

fr.kmap.gz

Yet it appears that the following might be worth trying:

fr-latin0.kmap.gz
fr-latin1.kmap.gz
fr-latin9.kmap.gz
fr-pc.kmap.gz
fr-x11.kmap.gz
mac-usb-fr.kmap.gz
fr_CH.kmap.gz
fr_CH-latin1.kmap.gz
mac-usb-fr_CH-latin1.kmap.gz

These are from the standard knoppix base from which we are derived.

I would not know which one(s) work or not. Please give these a shot and let us know. Maybe we should have a poll of these french keymaps to know which one are not being used or are broken?

Quote (roberts @ Jan. 07 2006,10:24)

Thx for your answer Robert. I thought there was something else I missed. I'm then gonna keep on trying every situation and for sure, I'll let you know about the result. For your info I already tried : latin 1 and 9, pc and X11 because the rest seems to be usb (I'm ps2) or CH (Swiss KB), but I'll try anyway, just to make sure.

If it happens none works, are you willing to bring a new pattern to cope w/ French needs ? I'm sure a great deal of the 60 million French people will love this lite s/w, as long as they can communicate w/ their own KB.

I'm gonna work now!!! using
Ctrl+Alt+Tab
$ xsetup.sh

By the way Robert, as you seem to be a quite aware guy. I've tried to modify /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig whose keyboard is initiated at "us". Impossible to turn it into French, either from beaver or from vi (terminal). Any reason for that ? should I use a special priviledge? maybe all my Pbs come from that? do you agree?

Anyway Thx again for your help, bye

PS : for your info, on my other Ubuntu PC (which works perfectly w/ French KB) I've got in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (by the way I've no access to this w/ DSL, why?)
identifier: generic keyboard
driver: Kbd
option: coreKeyboard
option: KbdRules xorg
option: KbdModel pc105
option: KbdLayout fr
option: KbdVariant latin9

The only thing I don't have access to is pc105, and maybe that's the Pb, keyboard limited to 100 or less combinations. Does it seem relevant to ypu?

Hi Robert

As promised I come back to you. Here is the result of the tests

1- azerty : there are some missing keys, not only the accentuated

2- fr: "e" w/ a stress on top (accentuated "e") is replaced by a "kind of bow" (I don't know the name in English). All the typical French characters are replaced by something else

3- fr-latin0/1/9: are the same w/ no accentuated characters displayed and no shift+key working

4- fr-pc: same as above but shift operates correctly on 90% of the keys

5-fr-X11: same as above

6- ANSI: complete mess (as I guessed)

That's it Bob, I'm afraid there's a bug somewhere because, for your info, on my other PC running Ubuntu, here is the result of /etc/X11/xorg.conf

identifier generic keyboard
driver Kbd
option coreKeyboard
option XkbRules xorg
option XkbModel pc105
option XkdLayout fr
option XkdVariant latin9

FYI, I dont have access to that file in DSL. I did not find xorg.conf, so I cannot compare especially the pc105 line which bothers me!!

Waiting for your feed back to go ahead. Thx for your time Bob

Sorry to hear such.
We don't use X.org or even XFree so it will do no go to compare to other distros that have such.
If you have acess to other Knoppix cdrom then I suggest to try that.
We don't make keyboard maps. But if you find one that works for you from Knoppix then I would try to include it. Let me know.
Also, maybe some other French user knows the answer, like that what was needed for proper German keyboard support.
Look inside /home/dsl/.xinitrc to see this.
Recently, a user suggested Thai keyboard maps which he found, which I was happy to include for his testing.
So whatever you can do to help other French users would be most welcome.

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