Keyboard switching

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hello,

I would like to have keyboard switching between English (UK) and Russian. Or ideally between English (Ireland) and Russian.

But I am doing a SuseStudio appliance for a USB stick, and yast, heavy as it is, is not included; I find myself unable to make an appliance with a working yast2 that would boot in testdrive, so I could use the changed files feature to make and grab the changes. And all opensuse guides I could find just tell one to use yast to set up the keyboard.

Can I somehow do this without yast? I did find the file /etc/sysconfig/keyboard, but I did not find documentation for it.

2

For GUI it ends up in X server configuration, like

bor@opensuse:~> cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf 
# Read and parsed by systemd-localed. It's probably wise not to edit this file
# manually too freely.
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "system-keyboard"
        MatchIsKeyboard "on"
        Option "XkbLayout" "us,ru"
        Option "XkbVariant" ","
EndSection

See “man 4 kbd” for list of supported options.

3

Thank you! This has worked. I also used some old settings from a past Debian installation to work out what to put in the file.

I now have Irish and Russian keyboards, switched by Alt+Shift and working perfectly. The system locale is POSIX (saving space on bootable USB stick), yet there does not seem to be a problem with Russian in Firefox. I can’t read Russian file names on the FAT32 USB stick, but it’s not a problem, I don’t really need them.

Here is my shiny new /etc.X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf file. I have used susestudio to add it to the appliance and it works fine.


Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "system-keyboard"
        MatchIsKeyboard "on"
        Option "XkbLayout" "ie,ru(winkeys)"
        Option "XkbOptions" "grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll,nbsp:none"
EndSection