Unintelligible

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Dvorak keyboard in Ubuntu/Xubuntu

For my own reference, a couple of ways of setting up the Dvorak keyboard in Ubuntu Linux.

In Gnome:

System > Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts tab > Add button > Dvorak

For a single terminal session:

loadkeys dvorak

Adding this line to your .bashrc should result in it applying to all your terminal sessions.

All X sessions (including the GDM logon screen and Gnome):

For all X sessions (including the GDM logon screen and Gnome), add Option "XbdLayout" "dvorak" to /etc/X11/xorg.conf as such:

Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
  Driver "kbd"
  Option "CoreKeyboard"
  Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
  Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
  Option "XkbLayout" "dvorak,gb" #use the dvorak keyboard layout
EndSection

This allows switching between the Dvorak and GB layouts by pressing both shift keys at once.

System-wide:

Simply make sure that /etc/default/console-setup contains the following lines (replacing any options with the same names that might already exist):

XKBLAYOUT="us"
XKBVARIANT="dvorak"

The change will take place after the next reboot. This is equivalent to choosing Dvorak as the default keyboard layout during installation, or running sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup from the command line.

posted by Nick at 2:20 am - filed in dvorak, linux