Keyboard layout whonix 18

Support
1

Hi,

I can’t set the keyboard layout I would like, in my case Swiss-French KEYMAP=fr_CH-latin1

I read the wiki but I can’t figure it out. Keyboard Layout

Why do we not have the possibility to change it in settings > Keyboard as before ? That was so easy…

Thanks for supporting me.

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2

LXQt settings are currently unsupported under Wayland, which Kicksecure and Whonix 18 currently use. In short, you will need to enter sysmaint, open a terminal, input commands with elevated privileges, then restart back into a user session for the changes to take effect.

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3

Hi @FranklyFlawless and thank you for your message.

I started my machines in sysmaint mode and opened a terminal, tried that command sudo set-system-keymap --interactive but I can only set my keyboard in FR, no option like CH display or latin1 is proposed from what I have seen.

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4

After selecting fr, type list, then the Enter key to list the available keyboard variants:

afnor
azerty
bepo
bepo_afnor
bre
dvorak
ergol
ergol_iso
geo
latin9
latin9_nodeadkeys
mac
nodeadkeys
oci
oss
oss_latin9
oss_nodeadkeys
us

You can type q, then press the Enter key to quit the list and go back to the previous dialog.

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5

do you see the latin1 and CH somewhere ?

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6

At the very beginning of the interactive session, select ch, then fr. Does that work?

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7

oh, yes, that works :grinning_face:

Great, thank you :folded_hands:

But still problems with some characters like : - ; . < >, etc

The first step is ch, second is fr but no clue for the third one which would fix the characters.

So I would need to know what has replaced latin1 :thinking:

Why did they make it so complicated, for a keyboard layout :confounded_face:

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8

I found the reason why your keyboard variant was not detected, along with a few workarounds:

See also:

3 Likes
9

I will try this, thank you @FranklyFlawless

I wish I could copy/paste those commands from my host machine to whonix 18 :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

ck@mint ~ $ wget https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kbd/kbd-2.7.1.tar.gz -O /tmp/kbd-2.7.1.tar.gz
ck@mint ~ $ cd /tmp/ && tar xzf kbd-2.7.1.tar.gz
ck@mint /tmp $ sudo cp -Rp /tmp/kbd-2.7.1/data/keymaps/* /usr/share/keymaps/

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10

Well the latest version for kbd is 2.9.0 as of September 4th, 2025, so assuming it also works fine, here are the updated commands:

wget https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kbd/kbd-2.9.0.tar.gz -O /tmp/kbd-2.9.0.tar.gz
cd /tmp/ && tar xzf kbd-2.9.0.tar.gz
sudo cp -Rp /tmp/kbd-2.5.1/data/keymaps/* /usr/share/keymaps/
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