How to set up and change keyboard layout/language?

MNT Pocket Reform
1

As expected, the Pocket Reform with Sway is a challenge for me - but is a good reason to start with a new operating system interface.

During the initial setup, I chose Germany as the keyboard layout (should have looked at the keyboard labeling beforehand). Now I know better.

  • I want to set US-QWERTY with EurKey.

Tried the following:
A) set the keyboard to US with “sudo reform-config”, but no change after reboot
B) add to sway config from

input * {
        xkb_layout us
}

also no change after reboot

  • Where are the entries (config-file) for layout and language entered during initialization?
    (Target US-QWERTY and EurKEY, as specified in Chapter 3, input devices).
  • How can I restart the MNT Reform Setup Wizard?
  • Where can this be adjusted manually?
1 Like
2

I have a similar, but maybe unrelated problem.

The key combination for f11 (hyper q) seems to work OK, but the combo for f12 (hyper w) does not. I selected US layout but would try others.

I’m hoping that the answer to your question might also shed some light on mine.

3

The reform-config tool is a very thin wrapper around:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
sudo systemctl restart console-setup
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

The relevant command here is the first. It edits your /etc/default/keyboard and it would be interesting to see what is currently in yours.

That being said, if you want those settings to take effect even in the prompt for disk encryption for example, you also have to regenerate your initramfs by running:

update-initramfs -u

But: those settings will only change keyboard layout for your console. And I don’t mean the terminal that you can open in sway. I mean the terminal that you see before sway is started.

Where exactly did you add that? The setup wizard should put something into this file:

.config/sway/config.d/input

It would be interesting to see what you have in your copy of that file. This file is loaded from the main sway config by the line that says:

include config.d/*

If you put your input * {} block above that line, then the settings from .config/sway/config.d/input will of course override it.

There are two things to configure, your terminal or console (the thing that prints to your screen before sway starts) and sway itself. The former is configured in /etc/default/keyboard the latter is typically configured in .config/sway/config.d/input.

I can tell you if you really, really want to know how to do this but I do not think you should restart the wizard because that will very likely break parts of your system. The setup wizard is supposed to only be run once: during the setup. It is performing destructive operations if you already have an existing setup configured.

In /etc/default/keyboard (regenerate the initramfs after editing that file) and in .config/sway/config.d/input (restart sway afterwards).

1 Like
4

Thanks for the incredibly detailed and, I think, helpful answer to my question.
The following is worth another post, I’ve just listed here why I can’t respond to this good description:
Yesterday I found the time to look at it. But the battery was dead. The keyboard indicator showed 0% and off.
So I charged the laptop first. After about 3 hours, a “T” appeared in the top left of the mini display. Does this mean anything?
At least I now have a very expensive, beautiful black brick. :dizzy_face: The laptop no longer boots and even the keyboard mini-display no longer works. I need to do some research on this forum to find a solution to this major issue.

5

Apparently it means “Timeout”

https://mntre.com/reform-irc-logs/2024-12-16.log.html#t09:08:48

1 Like
6

Just to give you an update: for other reasons (hardware defect) I ended up restarting the entire OS. … and I’m happy with EurKey (US) so far.