CentOS - May 2006 - Keyboard layout switching bug: workaround?

Hi,

I'm an Austrian writer living in Montpezat (South France). I've been
100%
GNU/Linux for the past five years, and I recently switched from Slackware to
CentOS, for the sake of comfort. Overall impression: I like it!

I have a few problems to solve yet in my migration effort, mostly minor
annoyances. First things first.

I need three different keyboard layouts: de, fr_CH and fr. I'm used to
toggle
between these. Now this doesn't seem to work with CentOS 4.3. (My system is
in
french, so I have to translate Menu entries back to english, I don't know if
they will be accurate...). Anyway.

Applications -> Preferences -> Keyboard opens the keyboard configuration
window.
There's a section called "Agencement" in french, guess this will
be "layout".
When I try to add a layout, I get the following error message: (again,
translating back from french)

---
XKB configuration error during activation. Probably an internal X server error.
...
---

I close the error message window. The new layout seems to be added. But when I
try to toggle keyboard layouts (default: pressing [Alt] + [AltGr]), I get
something that could be best described as a martian layout. Lots of nonsense.

Now how could I fix this?

When using XFCE with Slack, before the days of a keyboard switching plugin, I
just manually defined some commands like 'setxkbmap [some options] -layout
fr_CH', and then assigned these to some keyboard shortcuts. Is this a viable
solution here? Or what would you recommend?

This is rather annoying, since I type text in three languages (I also work as a
translator), and I'm a bit stuck here.

Any suggestions?

Niki Kovacs

Niki Kovacs wrote:
> XKB configuration error during activation. Probably an internal X server
error.
Take a look at the end of /var/log/Xorg.0.log, maybe also 
/var/log/messages and see if there is any better diagnostic.  If there 
isn't, try running

system-config-keyboard

from a graphical console window and see if any diagnostic can be seen 
from stderr.
> When using XFCE with Slack, before the days of a keyboard switching plugin,
I
> just manually defined some commands like 'setxkbmap [some options]
-layout
> fr_CH', and then assigned these to some keyboard shortcuts. Is this a
viable
> solution here? Or what would you recommend?
I don't have any experience, maybe someone else can recommend a way. 
But the ideas above might help with a clue about the source of the problem.

-Andy
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