Bugzilla – Bug 135581
keyboard settings are confusing
Last modified: 2008-08-14 20:56:18 UTC
For reasons best left unexplained, I installed NLD 9 with Spanish as its default language. That means that my keyboard defaulted to using a Spanish layout (as opposed to a Latin American one; I believe that they're different). I wanted to use a US English keyboard, so I made an adjustment from the gnome control centre and everything worked as expected. A long time later (last night), I upgraded from NLD 9 to (open) SUSE 10.0. Back to a Spanish keyboard layout. I went into the keyboard thing in the control centre and deleted the entry for Spain and added United States. There was no indication as to whether it stuck, and, in fact, it did not. Later, I went into YaST and removed all the settings of "Spanish" and "Spain" and "es" and "es_*" that I could find. Now, when I log into gnome, I get a dialogue saying the following: "The X system keyboard settings differ from your current GNOME keyboard settings. Which set would you like to use?" My gripe in this bug report is that the dialogue leaves me asking "What does this mean? How are they different, and how should I choose?"
The dialog actually means that the xorg.conf keyboard settings and the ones for your user in GNOME now differ. Its meant to advise people that try to alter their xorg.conf and wonder why it doesn't work in GNOME.
Of course, YaST is twiddling with the X system keyboard settings rather than the Gnome ones. This dialog is asking what seems to me to be a fair question. Reconciling YaST and the Gnome control center isn't really an upstream issue. I'm removing the "should_go_upstream" keyword. Some of the confusion in this case may have been caused by the xfree86->xorg migration, which is something we don't expect to happen again, and that much of the bug may well be WONTFIX in a SL10.0 context, though perhaps we should try to make sure it's handled gracefully in NLD->SLED upgrades.
Mark, its not specific to yast/gnome cc. Anyone who alters their xorg.conf file will see this dialog, regardless of how they do it (assuming they change their keyboard settings). The intent of the upstream bug should be to clean up the language of the warning dialog.
The upstream bug is http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314625 which has been resolved FIXED. I would assume this fix is now in 10.3, at least.