============ INSTALLATION ============ Run "make build" and "make install". The first of these commands will build the package and the second command will install the necessary data in /usr/local and /etc. This command will install in /etc/console-setup/ckb keyboard definitions that are more or less identical to the keyboard definitions used by X Window. If your system uses X Window there are very good chances that there are already keyboard definitions in /etc/X11/xkb or /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb. In that case you can remove /etc/console-setup/ckb in order to use the data proveded by X Window and to have identical keyboard configuration on the console and in X Window. If you want to install the files in different places you can use a command like this one: make etcdir=my_package/etc prefix=my_package/usr install This command will install the configuration files in the directory my_package/etc and the other files under the hierarchy my_package/usr. In order to uninstall the package use the comand "make uninstall". =========== BASIC USAGE =========== The easiest way to setup the console is to use the "setupcon" program. In most cases you will invoke it without arguments - it will read its configuration from ~/.console-setup or /etc/default/console-setup. The command "make install" installs the example configuration file "config" as /etc/default/console-setup. You can edit it to suit your needs. In general, the configuration has two parts - font and keyboard. The font configuration is straightforward, read README.fonts for more details. The keyboard configuration consists of giving values to four variables - XKBMODEL, XKBLAYOUT, XKBVARIANT and XKBOPTIONS. These variables have the same meaning as the XkbModel, XkbLayout, XkbVariant and XkbOptions options in the fail /etc/X11/xorg.conf and also the same meaning as the parameters of the options -model, -layout, -variant and -options of the setxkbmap utility. For detailed instructions read "The XKB Configuration Guide" by Kamil Toman and Ivan U. Pascal: http://www.xfree86.org/current/XKB-Config.html Other possible readings are: http://pascal.tsu.ru/en/xkb/ http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/xkb/ If you do not want to read these, here are two examples: # This will give you the standard US QWERTY layout (us), where the # menu-key acts as Compose-key (compose:menu) and the CapsLock will be # third Control key (ctrl:nocaps). XKBMODEL=pc105 XKBLAYOUT=us XKBVARIANT= XKBOPTIONS=compose:menu,ctrl:nocaps # In this configuration the Control+Shift combination will toggle # (grp:ctrl_shift_toggle) between French keyboard (fr) without dead # keys (nodeadkeys) and British (gb) "Dvorak" (dvorak) keyboard. The # right Win-key will be Compose-key (compose:rwin) and the right # Alt-key will be AltGr (lv3:lalt_switch). XKBMODEL=pc105 XKBLAYOUT=fr,gb XKBVARIANT=nodeadkeys,dvorak XKBOPTIONS=grp:ctrl_shift_toggle,compose:rwin,lv3:ralt_switch ========================== ALTERNATIVE CONFIGURATIONS ========================== If you have to switch often between different encodings, keyboards or languages you can prepare several alternative configuration files for setupcon. Suppose that most of the time you use Greek language, Greek keyboard and UTF-8 encoding, but sometimes you need to type in German and ISO-8859-15 encoding. Create the main configuration file /etc/default/console-setup for Greek: ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]" CHARMAP=UTF-8 CODESET=Greek FONTFACE=VGA FONTSIZE=16 XKBMODEL=pc105 XKBLAYOUT=us,gr XKBVARIANT= # The right Alt toggles between Latin and Greek # The option grp_led:scroll is ignored XKBOPTIONS=grp:toggle,grp_led:scroll Create also a second file /etc/default/console-setup.german for German: ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]" CHARMAP=ISO-8859-15 CODESET=Lat15 FONTFACE=VGA FONTSIZE=16 XKBMODEL=pc105 XKBLAYOUT=de XKBVARIANT= # The right Alt functions as AltGr XKBOPTIONS=lv3:ralt_switch Then use the command "setupcon" to configure Greek console and the command "setupcon german" to configure German console. (By the way, when you change the working encoding as in this example, you will have to change also the locale.) If you don't want to exploit superuser priviledges, use the files ~/.console-setup and ~/.console-setup.german instead of /etc/default/console-setup and /etc/default/console-setup.german. ============== ADVANCED USAGE ============== You may want to make your system automatically configure the console. In this case make sure that the "setupcon" program is invoked during the system bootup. You may want to use as example the startup script of Debian - debian/console-setup.console-setup.init. If you want to configure the console too early it may happen that the /usr file system is not yet mounted. In order to overcome this obstacle make sure that "setupcon" is installed in /bin and not in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin. In addition use the command setupcon --save This command will put in the directory /etc/console-setup all data (font, ACM and keyboard map) relevant to your configuration. Notice that the following utilities are still necessary: "setfont" or "consolechars", "kbd_mode" and "loadkeys". Depending of your distribution they may be installed in /bin (in which case you can have early console setup), or all or some of them may be in /usr/bin (in which case they will be unavailable before /usr is mounted). Sometimes only the keyboard part of the configuration is possible before the /usr file system becomes available. In this case you can setup the console in two passes. First, use the command setupcon -k as early as possible to setup the keyboard (the early keyboard setup may be essential if for example fsck fails). Next wait until /usr is mounted and use the command setupcon -f to configure the font. ======= CKBCOMP ======= The "ckbcomp" utility is used to generate keyboard map that the kernel (and the "loadkeys" utility) understands. It accepts more or less the same arguments as the setxkbmap utility: ckbcomp [args] [ [ [