How To Do It Yourself

I’m familiar with FreeBSD, but never used it as a desktop until now. I have decided to give it a try. Everything went well until I had to deal with KDE. There is no tool by default to configure the keyboard layout (there is one in PCBSD) and I don’t know the name of such tool. This is a must for me, since I’m a DVORAK keyboard user and typing on QWERTY is a real pain.

Found this quick fix, thanks to the guys on Freenode ##freebsd!

Insert the following code in /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy/x11-input.fdi

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keyboard">
<merge key="input.x11_options.XkbModel"
type="string">pc105</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.XkbLayout" type="string">dvorak</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

Restart KDM and you’ll be able to use the new layout.
You may replace the dvorak word with de,ro,hu,fr,etc. to set a different layout!
If you find the name of the KDE tool that sets this up, please comment.

written by Cristian \\ tags: dvorak, FreeBSD, keyboard, layout