Gnome 2.28 GDM Keyboard layout

Question

Hello,
A few months ago I installed Arch + Gnome 2.26 and never had problems since then until I upgraded to Gnome 2.28. Now with the rewritten GDM the keyboard layout (for entering the username because I don't like select-your-user-from-the-list-thingies) is set to USA (qwerty) while the rest of my system is completely BE (standard, no variant) layout. Before the upgrade also GDM was 100% BE, but now the username is USA and when I want to enter the password it changes immediately to BE (because in the panel down I chose BE). Is there a way to also make the username respond to the BE layout?
==> What works in BE?
TTY's
password prompt of GDM
gnome session
terminals
==> What works not in BE and responds to USA layout?
GDM username prompt
How weird is that? My system is setup as described in the beginners guide (keyboard layout in 10-osvendor.fdi file + hal + evdev) which was system-wide until the update.
I looked around and found some similar threads, but only complaining about keyboard variants, which is not my issue. Also on the Gnome forums, there is no-one with this problem. I checked all config files and XML files related to GDM I could found, but nothing helped.
I noticed that with the Ubuntu Karmic Beta live CD, upon entering the keyboard layout from the boot screen, everything was BE as I want it to be. It proves to me it's all possible, but I can't find how.
Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

killajoe wrote:
/etc/gdm/custom.conf is the file to configure gdm:
http://library.gnome.org/admin/gdm/2.28 … on.html.en
there is no gui but for what we need a gui for that?
That's very interesting, thanks for the link. Sure, it's possible that way, but a few weeks ago there still was a GUI for it and now everything has to be done manually again. That sounds very much like a regression to me Anyway, that's not really the point. GDM documentation pages tell us that the system keyboard layout is used to login and that every user logging in can choose their preferred session. However, our system languages (which are different than USA) are not detected correctly and there is no option to override this in custom.conf.
/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/recent-languages
    [] (string list)
    Set to a list of languages to be shown by default in the login window. Default value is "[]". With the default setting only the system default language is shown and the option "Other..." which pops-up a dialog box showing a full list of available languages which the user can select.
    Users are not intended to change this setting by hand. Instead GDM keeps track of any languages selected in this configuration key, and will show them in the language combo box along with the "Other..." choice. This way, commonly selected languages are easier to select.
/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/recent-layouts
    [] (string list)
    Set to a list of keyboard layouts to be shown by default in the login panel. Default value is "[]". With the default setting only the system default keyboard layout is shown and the option "Other..." which pops-up a dialog box showing a full list of available keyboard layouts which the user can select.
    Users are not intended to change this setting by hand. Instead GDM keeps track of any keyboard layouts selected in this configuration key, and will show them in the keyboard layout combo box along with the "Other..." choice. This way, commonly selected keyboard layouts are easier to select.
Has someone the answer to the questions I asked earlier:
1. Will I still be able to update gdm via pacman -Syu after rebuilding gdm with this patch?
2. And will there come an official Arch GDM update with this patch to solve the problem or is the only way to get it solved dealing with the patch now?
Last edited by ulukai (2009-10-17 15:28:35)