I have a problem with czech special chars in console (I can see only squares instead of the chars which are placed on 12345… keys). When I change the font manually:
You could also put XKBOPTIONS=compose:ralt in /etc/default/keyboard and run
Ad 2: Use Yast to set the global keyboard setting to English (US), use the GNOME control center to set the keyboard layout used in the deskop environment