This must be an elementary problem, but a lot of time has gone by trying to solve it without success:
During installation of OS-11.2 with KDE 4.3.1 I have specified the us keyboard that allows diacritical signs (such as accented e) to be produced. After installation I found the keyboard to have been changed to simple us - without the diacritical signs.
In Yast this cannot be changed (it used to be possible in earlier versions) and in KDE - configure desktop-Regional&Language-Keyboard Layout it is not possible to enter a “Layout variant”.
So, I am stuck. Oh yes, there seem to be several bug reports in Bugzilla, but no remedy is posted there. Can someone on this Forum please help?
This issue is one of the reasons why I am not a big fan of the idea of removing SAX2, it used to have stuff like this but now its practically impossible because KDE4’s keyboard settings are a joke.
I recommend you follow up with the bug reports. There are a LOT of options in KDE for changing the keyboard, so clearly some one has spent a LOT of work setting it up, albeit it reads like it is still a step backward from what you liked in YaST.
Sax2 and YaST keyboard functionality, unfortunately, was depreciated because its functionality could not be maintained with Hal … No one was willing to step up to the plate and volunteer to maintain it, … and even if someone was (which I believe no one was) I do not know if it would have been kept.
Could they have made a workaround though?
This auto config nonsense seems to be in Ubuntu too, guess its hitting all the major distros.
Bad news if you want stuff to work.
I don’t think there is any “easy” work around. For YaST keyboard function, to continue to work properly, it had to match that of HAL. As noted, that could not be done with the volunteer resources available. I recall reading the view that to leave it (YaST/sax2 keyboard functionality) in would have caused more problems than taking it out.
And given the functionality wrt hal, I suspect the same problem that existed with YaST/sax2, may be applicable for any other such front end manual configuration tool.
Probably what one needs to do now, if they wish the functionality (while waiting for either HAL to be updated, or waiting for some other application to be created) is to dive into the details as to what YaST did with the keyboard and how it did this. Likely no easy thing and probably very technical. Do that and write/target bug reports on the functionality that is now missing.
Indeed autoconfig is the way things are going. The user community is demanding it, and the vast majority of users are complaining auto config is not moving fast enough. They all want hardware to “just work”.
However for those with hardware or requirements that are not 100% main stream, then the chances of that hardware NOT working, may increase for while (but thats strictly my personal view) until the auto config software becomes more capable.
Thank you Oldcpu and Taralkeda for your comments.
My conclusion is that a remedy is unavailable. Difficult to believe: everyone in the Netherlands has a need for correctly spelling “cafe” (coffeehouse) once in a while. Personally I need the accented e’s several times each day.
Workarouds:
- Go back to 11.1 and wait (how long?) until this problem is fixed.
- Experiment with all the other available keyboard layouts.
Sigh…what a waste of time.
Solved!
Following up on my own advice, the first other layout I tried was Belgium. Here I found that Layout variants were indeed available. Then I removed Belgium and selected USA. Now several variants were available among which us-alt-intl. Even a reboot did not change this selection.
Further experimenting showed that preselecting France also works. I*haev not checkced other countries.
Anyway, I thank you again, Oldcpu and Tarakelda, for your comments, somehow they have pushed me towards the (improbable) solution of my problem.
hws38 - congratulations on finding a solution.
I confess I am spoiled with Canadian English being my first language, and my being vary familiar with USA English, having been subjected to US television, US newspapers, and other US publications most of my life.
But my wife is Thai, and getting a foreign language keyboard to function with all the necessary characters is important to her, and she typically can teach me many things as I know absolutely NOTHING about this subject.
There are MANY openSUSE wiki on keyboards, and as near as I can determine, none of them have been updated to reflect the current openSUSE approach in 11.2. That is a bit disappointing: