[PROBLEM] Keyboard layout unexpected behaviour problem Xfce

Question

Dear Everyone,
I am rather new to arch linux. I have recently (about a week ago) installed archlinux with xorg and xfce (booted by slim), and reading the wiki I managed to set up a fully working computer. But there is a slight problem that continues bugging me about keyboard layouts, and although I have found a way to make the keyboard layout switching with alt+shift work I think that I did it in a nonstandard way and some programs still exhibit unusual (and I think unintended) behaviour.
Here goes:
I use a notebook
My xorg uses hotplugging that seems to be working (hal and dbus installed and running at bootup, detects external usb mouse, I have no xorg.conf file). When I setup my keyboard I put the 10-keymap.fdi from the /usr/share/... dir into /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi and it contains (as instructed by the wiki):
<merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">us,ru</merge>
<merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string" />
<merge key="input.xkb.options" type="string">grp:alt_shift</merge>
And here is the problem:
After editig this file I restarted hal using
#/etc/rc.d/hal stop
#/etc/rc.d/hal start
and keyboard switching with alt+shift started working.
Then I went to the xfce keyboard settings to the layout tab and my setup was:
keyboard model -> evdev-managed keyboard
keyboard layout -> us   
so the russian layout did not appear (also adding the russian layout through this menu before editing the .fdi file was useless (it was the first thing I tried before reading the wiki and writing config files for hal))
I started the keyboard layout switcher applet for xfce and it also displayed only the us flag and had only us as the available layout, and even switching to russian layout using alt+shift had no effect on the displayed flag.
What I decided to do then was to restart my system.
Everything restarted without error (hal and stuff started etc..) but it was no longer possible to switch keyboard layouts using alt+shift.
The xfce keyboard settings now displayed us and ru as available layouts but switch between them using the mouse in the settings menu had no effect whatsoever. Also the layout switcher displayed that both layouts were available but for the russian keyboard the variant field displayed a lot of garbage (I will post screenshot soon). Switching to the russian layout through any key sequence defined in the applet was useless. Trying to switch it with the mouse by selecting the flag didn't do anything either.
The only way I discovered to make the alt+shift keys work is by manually restarting hal through
#/etc/rc.d/hal stop
#/etc/rc.d/hal start
which is very strange since I have not changed any settings file.
Then again every time I restarted my comuter the ability to switch layouts was lost until manually restarting hal.
The only  solution I found was going to the xfce keyboard settings and clicking the  "Use system defaults []"
After restarting the system alt+shift switching began to work fine but the keyboard applet didn't  work anyway.
As a consequence I think that all this is a big mess since I suppose that what I described is not the expected behaviour. The other effect of this is that only user with root priviledges could possibly add a new layout to the system (editing the /etc/hal/policy/10-keymap.fdi file) while the idea was that the gui tools of the DM (xfce in my case) permitted the user to change layouts on his/her own. Then again the keyboard layour applet never worked so it is impossible to have an indicator of the current layout. Where do you think should I write about this. I think this qualifies as a bug although I do not know whose fault is it: is it xfce, Xorg, hal or others?  And having to restart hal maunally without having changed any config files is rather strange. The garbage displayed by the applet is also suspicious.
Any advice to where to report this and how to fix everything would be great.
P.S. Throughout all these tries to make things work the setxkbmap command from the cli never had any effect.
Last edited by cavesnow (2009-03-14 10:41:51)

Answer 1

hmm... i have a similar problem:
i want two layouts: GB(english) and ES(spanish). I have them defined in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi :
<merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">gb,es</merge>
and i can actually switch between them. the issue is that i have an extra, unwanted layout. i have to press once in order to change from GB to ES, then if i want to switch back to GB, i have to switch twice. There is a third layout i did not configured.
Example of the layouts:
GB: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ES: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz    and i can write accents and everything for spanish:  ñÑáéíóú, etc.
unkown third layout: æ"¢ðeđŋħ→jĸłµnøþ@¶ßŧ↓"ł»←«
łħæŧ →ß ŧħ→ß???
sorry, i mean:
what is this???
any help would be appreciated.