Solution

[Hans Nieser]

Mark Nowiasz wrote:
> Hans Nieser wrote:
> 
>>I suppose this means that if you want a non-default keyboard layout you
>>have to set it through the XkbModel/XkbLayout options in xorg.conf from
>>now on. I wonder why the Keyboard Preferences dialog wasn't updated
>>accordingly though... I might be entirely wrong about this
> 
> 
> Actually, this is quite hard to believe - this would make the keyboard
> preferences (and the panel) totally useless. In this case, Gnome should
> disable the settings.
> 
> It's also hard to believe because there are very valid reasons to allow
> the user to use a different layout (instead of the system's layout):
> 
>       * consider a true multi-user system, where users want to use
>         "their" native keyboard layout (for example, at a international
>         university)
>       * sometimes, it's quite useful to switch layouts on the fly - the
>         US keyboard layout has certain aadvantages to the German one
>         when you want to program something ({}[] are more easily
>         accessible).
> 
> Disabling this feature would be madness, IMHO.

I fully agree, which is why I am seriously doubting wether my conclusion 
is correct, but then the comments for the 
"/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd/overrideSettings" key are pretty 
clear about it too.

I guess they real question is, what is meant by "system configuration"?, 
is it user-specific? (although I suppose the name can be percieved to 
imply that it is not), and where is it changed?