[Gllug] Switching keyboard layouts when changing keyboards

[Justin Perreault]

On Thu, 2008-07-24 at 18:04 +0100, Dylan wrote:
> Does anyone know of a way to associate the keyboard layout with the physical 
> keyboard, so that when I use the English keyboard I get the UK layout and 
> when I use the Russian one I get the RU layout without having to manually 
> switch between them? I know it's a bit of a picky issue, but as you can 
> imagine, since I touchtype in English and pick my way through with two 
> fingers in Russian, sometimes I can get half way through a paragraph and 
> discover I've forgotten to change layouts!
> 
> Any suggestions would be welcome. I'm using KDE3.5 on Suse10.3, and mainly use 
> the RU keyboard in OpenOffice 2.3. Each keyboard has a different ID string so 
> distinguishing them shouldn't be a problem.

I have not used Suse 10.3. My experience is from Fedora, using Gnome (I
think).

When manually changing the keyboard layout under keyboard preferences
(System-preferences-hardware-keyboard) I have a button for layout
options which gives a variety of choices for switching the layout using
hot keys.

In whatever dialogue you see when changing the layout try the help
button if there is one. The documentation, with luck, will tell you what
program is the backbone of the applet. Then read try to read the man
page of the program. If one exists chances are you can run it from the
command line. So you could then create your own hot key.

Now the two above are still manual as opposed to automagical. If you
want to get into the layout switching when you start typing on the other
my guess is that the hal daemon and some good script-fu will sort it
out. I would suggest reading up on hal.

Out of interest, do the two keyboards report as the same when pressing a
key?

HTH

Justin


-- 
If you are an adult, you can choose to act like a child. If you do not
accept being an adult, you are only a child. -JJJ

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug