KDE 'changes' my keyboard

[Petrus de Calguarium]

Martin Kho wrote:

> I have a strange issue. In the BIOS I've set the NumLock to on. During booting 
> it is turned off (huh..), so I have set 'Turn on' 'NumLock on KDE Startup' in 
> KDE.
> 
I reported this bug on October 20, 2008 and it has remained unfixed through all the 
versions of fedora and rawhide since then. It is bz# 467790. I have tried setting 
bios numlock on, bios numlock off, kde to on, kde to off, kde to unchanged, but 
nothing works. Only a couple of weeks ago, after over 2 years of complaining on 
bugzilla, have I given up. I now have bios off, kde to unchanged, and the system 
boots with numlock off and I have to expressly turn it on when I use it. 
Admittedly, as I think the number pad is a bit useless and superfluous anyway, I 
don't use it much anyway. Prior to about fedora 7 or 6, this used to work 
correctly.


> Since KDE 4.3.4, when I wanted to have quotes ('`"...) I needed to type an 
> extra space. Typically a wrong keyboard lay out was chosen!? I Just enabled 
> 'Enable keyboard layouts' in 'Regional & Language' and didn't change anything. 
> This solved the 'quotes-issue', but it turns off the NumLock-light (NumLock-
> function is still turned on).
> 
I am not really sure what is going on there and I am not a developer or programming 
expert. It sounds somewhat like there is a possibility that maybe you might be 
getting the excellent us-acentos (international) keyboard layout by default. If 
this is the case and you don't like it, you can disable it in system-settings, 
regional/keyboard. Enable keyboard layouts and make sure you have the evdev-managed 
keyboard, no matter what model you really have, select your language below, and 
under layout variant for your language, choose default to disable the international 
keyboard.

If you want to give it a try after all, select international (with dead keys). This 
international is also known as acentos on the command line and it has the advantage 
of allowing the keys on the keyboard to work like they are supposed to, ie. the 
accents for many European and other languages really work (you type the accent, 
then the letter, and the accented character will be typed). When you want the 
accent typed as a character, then you type the right alt (sometimes AltGr) along 
with the character (note that many of the accent characters appear on the upper 
case level, so you have to type right-Alt-Shift plus the accent; I think there is 
also a way to do this with the space bar preceded by the accent character, but I 
have not used that method and am not sure exactly how it works).

This takes a day or two to get used to, mainly when using the frequently occurring 
apostrophe and quotation mark, but once you are used to it, you will wonder how you 
ever got along without it. It allows you to type names and words correctly without 
having to enter cryptic codes or using cumbersome tools such as kcharselect to 
enter the characters.