[SOLVED] Configure keyboard layout in X using Gnome

Question

Hi. This is my first post since I just installed Arch two days ago.
My concern is about the console KEYMAP. I succesfully configured /etc/vconsole.conf so that KEYMAP=la-latin1 and it works almost perfectly. The only issue I have is that since my laptop was purchased in the US, using a latin american layout made me loose the greater and less characters (> and <), which are kind of essential characters for me and I'm already sick of copy pasting them. So I followed the KEYMAP section of the Wiki
Thing is none of the changes I make are taking effect, which is weird.
For now I'm only trying to get used to how it works so what I've been doing is the following (as the Wiki suggests)
cd /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty
Copy the keymap (la-latin1.map.gz) to a new file personal.map.gz
gunzip the new map file
Edit personal.map: here I'm just changing "exclam" for "dollar" for the 1 key to to test if it works before I add the characters I need
gzip the map file
Change the default keyboard layout file that will be used by editing /etc/vconsole.conf (you might have to create this file) and changing the line that says KEYMAP=la-latin1 to KEYMAP=personal
then I tried using sudo loadkeys personal, also tried rebooting the system and I still get the ! character when I use SHIFT+1 which is weird (because I configured it so i would get the dollar sign)
Later I tried to use localectl set-keymap personal also with no luck
I seriously don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'm sure one of you guys will be able to help me since probably I'm making some kind of stupid mistake I cannot figure out. You can be sure it's not something that stupid as exiting the files withouth saving. To be sure I also reopened the files later to check if the changes where saved and they were, both for the vconsole.conf  and personal.map.gz (which I gunzipped to read and then re gzipped).
I really appreciate any kind of help you can give me. THanks!
Last edited by volotec (2013-09-06 20:13:11)

Answer 1

I have a custom keymap in use on my system because I hate the Caps Lock.  So that and a couple other small modifications were made into wonderwoofy.map.gz.  Using /etc/vconsole.conf works just fine for me.  But I did notice that if I didn't have early KMS that I ran into a race condition with systemd-vconsole-setup.service and the system actually switching the graphics to KMS. 
Though my issue might be entirely unrelated to what you are experiencing because I was indeed able to change things with loadkeys (at the time I did this stuff, there was no localectl… or if there was I wasn't aware of it).  Maybe try making some other small change to see if there is something inherently wrong with what you have done in the first attempt.  For example, since this is just for testing, use a more common character like a letter or number to replace something.
I will tell you though that you are not the first person I have heard of recently who has run into vconsole.conf probems.  But the last person I read having such problems was at least able to correctly set their keymap with localectl (though the desired font apparently never took).