Typing in Sabayon [Solved]

[bnitch]

Why doesn't Sabayon have the same setup as other Linux distro's when it comes to changing over to Dvorak or Colemak. I've been looking for a typing style to try out that uses less of the little finger than most and found that in my most stable distro ( Sabayon ) they want to make it harder to try the many styles out there. Or as usual am I missing the info to do it.
I have no feeling in my left little finger which makes normal touch typing hard.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Why doesn't Sabayon have the same setup as other Linux distro's when it comes to changing over to Dvorak or Colemak.

And what, pray, would that 'same setup' be?

The precise steps simply depend on the DE you are using. For example, I happen to be typing this on a machine running the Xfce DE, so I'll use that as an example. I can simply use the standard Xfce GUI to select a keyboard layout:

1. Applications Menu > Settings > Keyboard
2. Click on the 'Layout' tab.
3. Untick 'Use system defaults'.
4. Select the keyboard layout I wish to change. I'll select 'English (UK)' for example.
5. Click 'Edit'.
6. Click on the arrowhead to expand the submenu for 'English (UK)' keyboard layouts.
7. Select the layout I wish. Under 'English (UK)' in this particular installation I see I have a choice of 'English (UK, Colemak)', 'English (UK, Dvorak with UK punctuation)', 'English (UK, Dvorak)' and several other layouts. There are even more choices for the 'English (USA)' layout.

The precise steps are different in KDE and GNOME, but the principle is the same: the DE has a standard way of selecting the keyboard layout, irrespective of the distribution. In KDE (and probably GNOME too) it's even easier than Xfce.

Outside of X Windows, the method of changing the keyboard layout for the console (virtual terminals) is the same as for Gentoo (see Section 4 in the Gentoo Linux Localization Guide). Similarly to X Windows, Dvorak and Colemak keyboard layouts are available for the console:

Code: Select all

 $ ls /usr/share/keymaps/i386/
azerty  colemak  dvorak  fgGIod  include  olpc  qwerty  qwertz

[bnitch]

In IBus which is where I would switch it over in a Ubuntu based distro I can find no options under input method to change or even to add a different keyboard layout. I have it open but the selections are not there and I haven't found any other program or setting to add them to the system. Which is Sabayon 10 KDE to be more informative, sorry about that.
And I did get it changed in the setting menu, so I will mark it as solved, thank you.
Sorry to be a pain.

[Fitzcarraldo]

IBus is not the way of changing keyboard layouts in Linux; it's one of several methods available and not necessarily installed in every distribution. I don't have IBus installed, so unfortunately cannot be of help in configuring that. BTW, now that you mention IBus, I recall it causing some problems to KDE users (not only in SL) using certain keyboard layouts (see e.g. Dead keys not working in several applications [Solved] and kde aplications without accents [Solved]).

I forgot to mention in my previous post that it is possible to set up keyboard shortcuts so that one can switch keyboard layouts quickly, and I have done this in my KDE and Xfce installations as I use several keyboard layouts with the laptops' keyboards and external USB keyboards. For example, I configured X Windows on my machine running Xfce to allow me to use Alt+Shift to toggle between 'English (UK)', 'Portuguese (Brazil)' and 'Spanish (Spain)' keyboard layouts. I did that by creating the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-keyboard.conf containing:

Code: Select all

Section "InputClass"
   Identifier "keyboard-all"
   Driver "evdev"
        Option "XkbModel"       "pc105"
   Option "XkbLayout"   "gb,br,es"
   Option "XkbOptions"   "grp:alt_shift_toggle"
   MatchIsKeyboard "on"
EndSection

KDE being more sophisticated that Xfce, I used the KDE GUI to configure my KDE installation to toggle between 'English (UK)', 'English (USA)', 'Portuguese (Brazil)' and 'Spanish (Spain)' keyboard layouts when I press Alt+Shift. Or I can toggle the layout by just clicking on the keyboard layout icon in the System Tray.