Bugzilla – Bug 118736
Bug in installation of French Canadian Keyboard and perhaps other keyboards
Last modified: 2005-09-29 15:07:07 UTC
When choosing the French language and a French Canadian Keyboard the French AZERTY keyboard is kept during the installation. What can happen is that if you use any characters that are not at the same place on a QWERTY keyboard you may not be able to login since you would have no clue what password you entered. It is also impossible to enter an entry when changing the hard disk partitioning since the user has no clue where the / is. A work around is to use the US Keyboard during installation but those people who are not familiar with Linux would object to that. Recently I had to help out one of my brothers who had a non functional system. I solved the problem by telling him where the keys were for the AZERTY keyboard. It turns out that the password was accepted using the keys of an AZERTY keyboard For instance if you were to enter a password waz4p9 you had actually entered a password zqw4p9 With this you get a cranky customer who thinks that SuSE Linux is a piece of crap. I have seen what may be a similar problem on a Debian install at one time. I didn't think about it then and assumed I had a broken system. My choice was at the time to toss the frisby in the garbage can and ignore Debian from that point on. The only thing that I had working on Debian was the automatic login without a password request. That bug may exist on some other installation, I wouldn't know since I only speak French and English.
The same problem has existed on all the SuSE installation as far as I can remember.
Please attach the complete /var/log/YaST2 directory. See https://bugzilla.novell.com/page.cgi?id=fields.html#bug_severity
Umm.. I don't exactly know what are you reporting. That "French Canadian Keyboard" is not actually used when is it selected?
(In reply to comment #3) > Umm.. I don't exactly know what are you reporting. That "French Canadian > Keyboard" is not actually used when is it selected? It uses the AZERTY French keyboard when the French language is choosen and a French Canadian keyboard is choosen. The only work around that I have found was to enter a password that would use keys that are at the same place on both keyboard and change it later or use the US Keyboard during the installation. All three French Canadian keyboards are QUERTY keyboard. Where you see QWERTY on the French Canadian keyboard you see AZERTY on the European French keyboard. This is not the only thing that confuse people. The / key is not found easily and to get the numbers under the function keys you have to press on the shift key. Most people used to a QWERTY keyboard would never think of that one. The keyboard I use is this one http://www.externe.net/clavier-normalise/ I will provide a patch to OpenSuse for it when I get it all debugged. SuSE doesn't provide the proper files for it and the ones from the Québec government are still buggy. I have one that works and am learning how xkb works so I can provide a patch to an upcoming OpenSuSE version.
(In reply to comment #2) > Please attach the complete /var/log/YaST2 directory. > See https://bugzilla.novell.com/page.cgi?id=fields.html#bug_severity > This would not help you because I installed using the US Keyboard and switched to the proper keyboard later. I got burned too many times. This problem has always been there and I have bought most of the SuSE distributions since version 6.0 I have used the French Canadian install when I installed the 32 bits version but wiped the installation out to install the 64 bits version where I used the US Keyboard during installation. I will ask one of my brothers who lives in Québec (Canada) for his files. He's the one I had to help enter the correct password since he wasn't familiar with the AZERTY keyboard. I work for a French company in Elkhart Indiana so I see those ridiculous keyboards often.
Marcus, for console yast2-country uses cf.map.gz, which is qwerty keyboard map. So the problem seems to be in default mapping this to X11 keymap. Currently, '/usr/sbin/xkbctrl cf' returns $[ "XkbVariant" : "fr", "XkbLayout" : "ca", "XkbModel" : "pc105", "Apply" : "-variant fr -layout ca -model pc105" ] Michel, it would help if you know which values are correct for X11 keyboard.
yes if you don't mind please add that information. Thanks
"Protocol" : "Standard" "XkbLayout" : "ca_enhanced", or "fr_CA" "XkbModel" : "pc105", I don't know about the variant what I know is that it doesn't load it, ca should be a valid keyboard It is also a QUERTY keyboard. There are three Keyboards, Multilingual (ca) French Canadian (cf) Normalized (cn) You could get my CN keyboard on my web page at http://home.comcast.net/~mcatudal/ tonight or tomorrow It will be on the front page "Keyboard for SuSE" or something like that. I will put the CN console keyboard file on the weekend. I haven't tested it yet. I will eventually update the latest xkeycaps when I get some time. If you take a look you will find out that I was the one who had added the French Canadian keyboard to it a few years back. You may have to change a few of my choices as I use the microsoft keys for some other stuff. I live in Michigan and all I got is a US keyboard and there is one key missing which I put on one of the right hand windows key. I also found it more convenient to have the ctrl Gr key on the left windows keys. What is basically different with this keyboard versus the others is that it has not only alt gr but both alt gr and ctrl gr. The keyboard is truly a multilingual keyboard. There is a company in Montréal that sells stickers that you can put on the changed keys on the keyboard. Any keyboard can then be converted to that keyboard.
I still have a question with this: are you complaining that "French Canadian" keyboard selected in YaST keyboard selection has _not_ the correct layout for French Canadian keyboard or that you want to select different keyboard layout which fits for you but is not provided by the YaST list? (Please answer with no more than one paragraph :-)). If Marcus is in the picture, just forget my comment.
Hmm, I'm lost a bit here. you told us that the old style "XkbLayout" : "fr_CA" "XkbModel" : "pc105" fits your needs. The new XKB files splitted up all those combinations into a basic layout and a variant which means fr_CA is a French Canadian keyboard or in others words a Canadian base keyboard with a French variant which is written as: "XkbLayout" : "ca" "XkbVariant" : "fr" and this is exactly what xkbctrl reports and what is set to xorg.conf Well I'm not an expert here but it's really important to understand what your problem is. fr_CA should be the same as ca + variant fr if it isn't this seems to be a bug in XKB
In short, does "setxkbmap -layout ca -variant fr -model pc105 -v" work for you? Looks like during installation the "fr" keyboard layout is used whereas after installation for configuration with SaX2 the "ca" keyboard layout with variant "fr" is used. This looks like a bug in YaST and not SaX2/X11.
Selecting "Francais" as language and "Francais (canadien)" works fine for me during complete installation and afterwards as well. I always get the QWERTY keyboard. I tested with RC4/final.