Permanently change default language and keyboard settings – what am I missing?

by

I’m trying to configure a Debian Linux (ARMHF 3.8.13-bone20) on a BeagleBone Black to use German as the default language and keyboard layout, which does not work, and I can’t see why. I’m talking about the console settings, not X or Gnome etc. Here are my settings and what I did so far:

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Here I chose de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8 and unselected en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8.

Output from locale:

LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Content of /etc/default/locale:

LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8

Content of /etc/default/keyboard:

# KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE
# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.
XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="de"
XKBVARIANT="nodeadkeys"
XKBOPTIONS="terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"
BACKSPACE="guess"

I ran setupcon after making these settings and it didn’t change anything, the layout still was en_US.

After that, I ran

dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

and set German - no dead keys as keyboard layout. Still no change, neither at once nor after a reboot.

Next, I tried

dpkg-reconfigure console-data

Here I chose

Choose layout from entire list

and then

pc / quertz / German / Standard / latin1 - no dead keys

The output after that was:

Looking for keymap to install:
de-latin1-nodeadkeys
#

At this moment, the correct keyboard layout is present, but unfortunately things revert to the English (US) keyboard layout after reboot.

What can I do to permanently change the keyboard layout? As far as I can see the correct keymap must be present as it can get loaded, but only until the next reboot. What am I missing here?

Update: When connecting via SSH the German keymap gets loaded.

Answer

You might try to add the boot parameters of debian-installer/keymap=de and keymap=de.

Also, the answer at the thread Keyboard layout HELP says :

  1. Go to the webmin and do this SYSTEM -> SOFTWARE PACKADGES -> UPGRADE ALL

  2. (I don’t recall if the order was this) Go to the console and do the following:

    apt-get install console-data
    apt-get install console-setup
    apt-get install console-locales
    apt-get install keyboard-configuration

  3. Do the dpkg-reconfigure for each of the packets above. REBOOT.

So maybe your problem is that you haven’t done all of them before rebooting.

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Rob , Answer Author : harrymc

Leave a Comment