Setting your keyboard layout

If you are using KDE2, you can use the KDE Control Center to set your keyboard layout for a particular country. From within the KDE Control Center select Personalization-->Keyboard Layout. Then, select the keyboard model and primary layout for your keyboard.

Optionally, you can select additional keyboard layouts and switch between them using a shortcut (hot key) that you can define. See the KDE documentation for detailed information.

Troubleshooting

If special characters are not displaying correctly on non-USA keyboards it is possible that high bits are being erroneously cleared. Check your terminal options:

   stty -a

If you see istrip (not prefaced with a minus sign) or -pass8 (prefaced with a minus sign), then set the istrip terminal option so that it does not strip input characters to seven bits. This should solve the problem.

   stty -istrip