Pasky’s Log

Very long time ago, several UCW sages congregated on the ultimate Czech programmer layout – they ended up with a US keyboard just like usual, except that capslock doesn’t lock case (good in itself!) but acts as a second shift, adding diacritic mark on the letter. So caps+s produces Å¡, caps+e produces é and caps+w produces Ä›. I have been using that ever since, but when moving to another system, setting this up always was a bit of a challenge.

But currently, the X11 Czech ucw layout is easy to set up on squeeze/sid (I’m currently using squeeze with xorg from sid – works fine). Xorg keyboard configuration is HAL-driven on sid currently, what you need to do is put this to /etc/default/console-setup:

XKBLAYOUT="us,cz"
XKBVARIANT=",ucw"
XKBOPTIONS="grp:caps_switch"

(Though, the way this works, using two groups, I’m not quite sure how to add another layout with reasonably seamless switching. Not my problem, but some other users might want that.)