mactel-support team mailing list archive

[Martin von Gagern <martin.vgagern@xxxxxxx>]

Starting with Jaunty, people seeing this "Error activating XKB
configuration" dialog might have a look at the .xsession-errors file in
their home directory. Error messages from xkbcomp will end up there, and
others might as well. Maybe the information from these files can be used
to differentiate the huge number of bugs duped here, and identify the
actual causes.

-- 
"Error activating XKB configuration." - Requires manual xorg.conf editing
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/67188
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Status in Mactel Support: Confirmed
Status in “control-center” package in Ubuntu: Invalid
Status in “xkeyboard-config” package in Ubuntu: Triaged
Status in “xkeyboard-config” package in Fedora: Won't Fix

Bug description:
After upgrading to Edgy Eft, the Polish symbols disapeared when I write. However, they are properly displayed at the menus, web pages, etc.. During logging in, the system showed an error message:
"There is an error of configuration activation of the XKB. This could be caused by:
 - error in libxklavier, or X serwera (tools xkbcomp, xmodmap), or serwer X is not comptible with libxkbfile implementation.
Version of serwer X:
The X.Org Foundation
70101000"
 The error message also suggests to run:
rados@domowy:~$ xprop -root | grep XKB

_XKB_RULES_NAMES_BACKUP(STRING) = "xorg", "pc105", "pl", "qwerty", "lv3:ralt_switch"
_XKB_RULES_NAMES(STRING) = "xorg", "pc105", "pl", "qwerty", "lv3:ralt_switch"

and
rados@domowy:~$ gconftool-2 -R 

/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd
 layouts = []
 model = 
 overrideSettings = true
 options = []


See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebuggingXAutoconfiguration for discussion of workarounds for this bug.  For more discussion also see http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-gnome/2005-December/013059.html and http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=288974.

A correct solution requires that Preferences > keyboard (or a similar GUI configuration tool) set the keyboard correctly, without requiring editing of xorg.conf.  Possibly it will need changed to not update gconf but rather update the xorg.conf file directly.


This problem sometimes is caused by a new xorg that doesn't support the selected XkbVariant for the configured keyboard layout, and the upgrade program doesn't reconfigure xorg.conf (or whatever) correctly to switch to the proper layout.