How to permanently configure keyboard

I use a Turkish keyboard which I have converted to English (Ubuntu server 12.04). My problem is that the single quote is not present on the keyboard but is instead represent by a comma in midair. To fix this I use the command

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

The problem is each time I shutdown, changes are reverted thus every time I start the system, I have to type that command. I was thinking of making it a cronjob but I`m sure there can be another way to make the changes permanent.

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6 Answers

using sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration will change your keyboardlayout just for this session.

go for sudo nano /etc/default/keyboard there you can change your keyboard settings.

Find the line :

XKBLAYOUT="xx"

You can change layout and kboptions as well as your model and the kbvariant.

Just put in tr for Turkish

on older ubuntu versions you could go for dpkg-reconfigure console-setup and make permanently changes here. but for server 12.04 I guess it should be in the keyboard file.

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The keyboard settings are stored in /etc/default/keyboard file. It's provided by the keyboard-configuration package, and other packages use this information in order to configure the keyboard on the console or in X Window System.

You can change your keyboard settings using:

dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
service keyboard-setup restart

Source

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To change it permanently via the terminal run this:

For US:

L='us' && sudo sed -i 's/XKBLAYOUT=\"\w*"/XKBLAYOUT=\"'$L'\"/g' /etc/default/keyboard

For French:

L='fr' && sudo sed -i 's/XKBLAYOUT=\"\w*"/XKBLAYOUT=\"'$L'\"/g' /etc/default/keyboard

For German:

L='de' && sudo sed -i 's/XKBLAYOUT=\"\w*"/XKBLAYOUT=\"'$L'\"/g' /etc/default/keyboard

and so on...

Tested on Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit.

---

To change it temporarily you can use setxkbmap mylayout...

# US
setxkbmap us
# French
setxkbmap fr
# German
setxkbmap de

In terminal mode, you need to use loadkeys instead of setxkbmap

# US
loadkeys us
# French
loadkeys fr
# German
loadkeys de

I was having the same problem since last year and i was everytime setting the keyboard layout when starting the system. I tried all methods but none helped except one which i found helped me :)

• Go > Applications > System tools > Preferences > Startup Application
• Add new
• Name: Default Keylayout
• Command: setxkbmap us
• Save

Restart the system :)

1

For console-only instances e.g. servers, you should install the console-data package with apt-get install console-data and then set it up with dpkg-reconfigure console-data.

I tried all of the above on an Ubuntu 16.04 and only the temporary solution setxkbmap xx did it for me so I manually included it in the .bashrc profile: sudo nano ~/.bashrc and then type setxkbmap xxreplacing xx with yor language code

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