Gnome does not support US-Dvorak layouts?

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Tommy McGuire

Looks like some of the problems I have been living with since I installed Ubuntu 8.04 are intentional.

(Short summary: I use a Dvorak layout; this laptop has an unmodified (and unmodifiable) Qwerty keyboard. I leave the Qwerty layout unchanged globally in case someone else needs to log in to it, and switch to Dvorak using the Gnome keyboard config. Unfortunately, that now means that control (and any modifiers) key strokes use the Qwerty layout; i.e. I type Ctrl+"I" (Ctrl-C, in Dvorak) and get a tab, not a break. The situation is even worse when I connect a physical Dvorak keyboard to the computer---I couldn't even look at the keyboard to figure out the translation.)

Fortunately, I've switched to xmonad and dumped most of the Gnome stuff. I get to manually hibernate and configure wireless networking[1], so "setxkbmap dvorak" isn't strikingly different.

[1] Who thought it would be a good idea to only provide an applet for network management?

Comments

Found your blog from a link to the "Infernal Device" section of your site from a link in a LTU post. Enjoying the site.

Anyway,
I'm a recent Archlinux convert (hardy was a bit too frustrating for my tastes) and have had great experiences with WICD for wireless management. It should be in the hardy repos. Few dependencies. Just a thought.

Regards,
Brit Butler
http://www.redlinernotes.com/
Redline6561
2008-08-13

Wicd looks like it is a little more manual than nm-applet, but it works great! Thanks for the tip!
Tommy McGuire
2008-08-13