[Solved] Accents on US keyboards

Question

Hello everyone,
I have already solved this for my laptop, so I post the solution to help someone else.
My laptop is a Dell Inspiron E1505, with English-us keyboard. And my main language is Spanish, so I normally use accents like áéíóú, and ñ.
The solution suggested on the wiki was not helpful for me:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acc … _keyboards
You may consider adding this other solution to the wiki.
I have found that the us xkb layout already has an International variant, with all the accents, so, to enable the accents on a us layout you only have to edit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi and correct the following two lines as follows:
<merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">us</merge>
<merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string">altgr-intl</merge>
Save, exit, reboot.
To use the accents, just press the right Alt + the key you want
Example: Alt+e = é
That way you get a lot of special characters (¿µñb®©œæøœïðßáöóíúüþëéåä, etc.)
That's it.
There's no need to modify xorg.conf or install extra stuff/config files or scripts to modify the default layout.
With this solution works perfect.
Updated - June 30, 2010
The HAL solution doesn't work any more with Xorg 1.8, so I solved it by adding the keyboard layout and variant to xorg.conf:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Keyboard Defaults"
MatchIsKeyboard "yes"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
Option "XkbVariant" "intl"
EndSection
Use "intl" variant to get á wit 'a, or "altgr-intl" to get á with AltGr+a
Last edited by iopo (2010-06-30 21:39:15)

Answer 1

Hello all,
Excuse me for the delay,
For me, the problem with the Xmodmap suggested in the wiki was:
1- XKeyCaps program was buggy (didn't allowed me to select a keyboard)
2- The Example xmodmap file doesn't have the same keycodes of my keyoboard, so the solution was to manually create my own keyboard layout.
If I was going to create my own keyboard layout, I think that the most clear/clean solution is to create a custom layout for HAL. I was going to do that, taking the "us" layout as base, and that's how I found that the us layout already hast the international variant (and there are a few other variants, you can search the one that better fit your needs). The default International variant was good for me, so there was no need to create a new layout
I think that the Xmodmap solution is more like a patch, and it may create some problem or confusion in a future after several system updates...
Maybe some Arch expert can give us a better explanation about both solutions.
Regards.