Spanish Keyboard doesn't WORK!!!!!!!&#

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Spanish Keyboard doesn't WORK!!!!!!!&#
started by: jesus

Posted by jesus on April 13 2006,09:41

HI up. I'm a spanish user. I do love DamnSmallLinux. I'm using it and spreading it from v.1.3. There's no problem if DSL developing group decide not to implement the spanish keyboard support into the distro but I would like to know how to do it. Unless we get that bug, the distro is nearly useless for a spanish user.

I've been searching and searching with no answer.

Just to know it, in spanish, like in other languages, we NEED to difference "de" and "dé", and so on. The "ñ" letter, @ properly placed... Now, DSL is very embarrasing only because of that.

Thanks in advance.

Posted by roberts on April 13 2006,15:25

What keymap are you selecting?
What keyboard key sequence typically would produce that character?

Posted by l0st on April 13 2006,15:32

going slightly off here, but language remains a large obstacle for seamless linux usage. Personally i have no problem with english, but sometimes I just gotta visit one or two foreign websites, and they don't show up right. Is there a *general* method for implementing that?

Posted by jesus on April 13 2006,16:32

Quote (roberts @ April 13 2006,11:25)

What keymap are you selecting?
What keyboard key sequence typically would produce that character?

Into the Spanish keyboard (like in others) The "@", "#" and the € appear pressing at the same time "AltGr" + 2 ( for @) , 3 (for #) and E (for the monetary symbol).

The Spanish keyboard has got a key similar to the "apostrophe" in "I'm": it is the accent. The accent is appliable to the vowel letters. So we get "á é í ó ú".e.g.: "My name is Jesús". The "Tilde" Key or accent Key gives us the way of pronouncing the word.
Another mistake is with letter "Ñ" (like in "España"), symbols ¡'¿? and many others. The keyboard is configured in English. For example now I'm typing with debian-sid-hdinstalled linux and I have got no problems. Do you know what I mean?
Each time I start with dsl I type like that. "dsl lang=es" at the beginning, in xsetup.sh also select "es es", usually it is preselected. But It doesn't works correctly.
Thanks in advance. But I don't understand what you mean. Trying to answer you, I'm having problems with the accent key, the €, the @... and so on. "AltGr"+Key

Posted by roberts on April 13 2006,20:36

I am running with the es keymap.
Yikes, I don´t know what is supposed to happen...

But I do get Ñ,ñ,¿?

¿Is there some specific application that does not?

Posted by jesus on April 14 2006,06:47

Quote (roberts @ April 13 2006,16:36)

I am running with the es keymap.
Yikes, I don´t know what is supposed to happen...

But I do get Ñ,ñ,¿?

¿Is there some specific application that does not?

I don't get the rest. Accents, the ñ it is not into its place... so I have to guess where is each key. That's not the way.

Try (with the es keyboard) to get the # the @ and the €. I cannot. And What's hapenning with the accents? Do you obtain á é í ó ú pressing the key accent key. Into the spanish keyboard the keys are like that:

qwertyuiop
asdfghjklñ
zxcvbnm,.-

And following the ñ key, in the centre line, should be the accent key and ç used in spanish variations like "Valencian" or used when writing French.

Posted by gabriel on April 14 2006,23:58

Quote (roberts @ April 13 2006,16:36)

>I am running with the es keymap.
>Yikes, I don´t know what is supposed to happen...

>But I do get Ñ,ñ,¿?

Sure?, perhaps you are in consele text mode, there, with the es keymap al seems to work, but in X, all is wrong:
1. The @ can not be obtained in firefox
2. Some alternate characters never works.
3. The most impoortant thing: WE HAVE NO DEAD KEYS, without it the system si simply unusable for a Spanish.

But I see more extrange things: in a statically compiled version of wine and winelib I am using to port some software, when I try to acces database objects created in windows, that work in other Linux distributions and are using in their names the characters ª or º, simply they are not regongnized at all giving an hard (very hard) to fix error, so it seems the trouble is more internal, but always about X, no about console aplications.

I Still find usefull (very usefull, it's the true) the Damm small distro, but for any final Spanish user (I use it for mounting servers, robots, and other things that do not take use of X) the keyboard issues are making the distro unusable. It' simply can't use our language. Perhaps the solution would be a full locales support (incrementiong the size ,I know but could be optional in a myDSL extension). I have benn trying to build locales, and a X server, but it's hard to do because of lacks (I know for size restrictions) of a lot of things needed for this . For the moment, I have not found any solution. Any one?

The final conclusion is that if DSL X could work as the real console , it would be fine. The questions is why it can't?

Posted by gabriel on April 15 2006,10:37

What Jesus means for accents is Dead Key, that in conjunction with vocals produce acutes . á é í'ó ú ö ï ü ë ä and the same with the Upercase ones. As I said before, this roblems is only in X, if you run in text mode level, you have no problems, so the problems is why X do not work in the same way.
To edit a Keymap does not seem to be a solution, because of I said before: 1. No dead key suport 2. there is something internal (confussion with variables in wine this shows, I think, that no only yo can't write but the system also does not also understands properly some codes)

Posted by spock on April 15 2006,13:53

For the Alt Gr key I guess you tried replacing in .xinitrc "de" with "es" after the line # For German Keyboards ? It seems this fixed the Italian keyboard too. Apart from that unless your machine is really old I can only suggest to use XFree86, it has much better i18n support than Xvesa.

Also answering LOst's question to display the language you want in Firefox all you need are the fonts. I've got a cjk-fonts.uci for Chinese, Japanese and Korean... (might send it to Robert as more users seem to ask for that). Input is another story !

Posted by clacker on April 17 2006,05:01

spock, I think it might be a great idea to get a list of keyboards besides the german (de) one that need that line in the .xinitrc file. I don't know if it works for Spanish, but from previous posts it looks like it works for

< Belgian azerty >
< se-latin1 >
< Norwegian >
Italian (from this thread)
and I'd swear scandinavian from a post of meo's, although I can't find it now

Maybe we need to change the .xinitrc file from looking for de keyboard to looking at anything but US keyboards.

Posted by suaiden on April 23 2006,05:43

I am going to get choked on this one, I can feel it, but I was wondering how to make the keyboard alternate between English and Russian, and if possible, Spanish.

I am a completely new user.

Please don't throw things at me.

Posted by dsllars on April 30 2006,10:43

One solution to this xkeyboard problem, might be to install xkeycaps

In DSL: Enable apt, run apt-get update & apt-get install xkeycaps

Run from terminal: xkeycaps

A graphical environment for the keyboard layout should appear.

Configure and save.

Posted by sergimb on April 30 2006,21:38

I have the same problem Jesús has. Only to mention the problem occurs in X applications only, not in terminal ones.
My DSL runs from cd, no hd install.
A real headache for a spanish user and the only/big reason to abandon this fantastic distribution.

Thanks and keep the good work

Posted by zwastik on June 26 2006,12:02

so how do we fix this?

and... is there a simple way of doing this?
I think using xkeycaps is not the right solution, this should work out of the box ^^.... please!

Posted by kuky on June 27 2006,07:31

if can help..

goes to < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....t=13163 >