setting up french keyboard

[Webster, Andrew]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter [mailto:petermatulis at yahoo.ca]
> Sent: Sunday, February 26, 2006 15:44
> To: Peter; Webster, Andrew; freebsd-questions
> Subject: RE: setting up french keyboard
> 
> 
> --- Peter <petermatulis at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> 
> >
> > --- "Webster, Andrew" <awebster at connectalk.com> wrote:
> >
> 
> > > > --- "Webster, Andrew" <awebster at connectalk.com> wrote:
> > > >
> 
> > > > > > Hi.  Does anyone know how I can set up my 5.4 system to output
> > > French
> > > > > > characters?  If so, how?
> > > > >
> 
> > >
> > > Try this when X is running:
> > > setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout ca -variant basic
> >
> > Hey!  This works in my X windows (é, è, ç, à , ê, ï) but my
> > terminal
> > emits beeps.  Is this normal?  Is the an easier way (X gadget) to toggle
> > back or do I need to always use the setxkbmap command?

Hmm, looks like you are outputting UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1, or at least your mailer is doing that.  UTF-8 is 16bit characters for the accented characters.
Which window manager are you using with X?  KDE or Gnome?  Both have keyboard manipulation tools as part of their packages.

Personally I prefer the US International keyboard.  This way the characters stay where they belong, but ', ", ^, ~, and ` are dead keys, so if you type ' followed by a you get á.  

I don't know if there is a quick switch key combination as in windows, but I'm sure there is something that can be setup.

> >
> > $ setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout ca -variant basic
> > $ setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us -variant basic
> 
> Hmmm.  Looks like my perfectly good French accents in my compose window do
> not end up as such when I read them in my browser.  When I reply (what I'm
> doing now) they come back to good characters.  Is this normal?  Anyways, I
> modified my xorg.conf keyboad section to try to toggle keyboard maps:
> 
> Section "InputDevice"
>         Identifier  "Keyboard0"
>         Driver      "kbd"
>         Option      "XkbModel" "pc104"
>         Option      "XkbLayout" "us,ca"
>         Option      "XkbOptions" "grp:toggle"
> EndSection
> 
> Surprisingly, by simply hitting the Right-Alt key I go from us to ca
> although hitting the key again has no effect.  Does anyone know how I can
> toggle without having to issue commands all the time?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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