The Linux Danish/International HOWTO
Thomas Petersen, petersen@risoe.dk
v1.0, 9 March 1994
This document describes how to configure Linux and various Linux
applications for use with the Danish characterset and keyboard. It is
hoped that Linux users from other places in Western Europe will find
this document of use too.
1. Introduction
All European users of almost any operating system have two problems:
The first is to tell the OS that you have a non-american keyboard, and
the second is to get the OS to display the special letters.
Under Linux you change the way your computer interprets the keyboard
with the commands xmodmap and loadkeys. loadkeys will modify the
keyboard for plain Linux while 'xmodmap' makes the modifications
necessary when the handshaking between X and Linux is imperfect.
To display the characters you need to tell your applications that you
use the ISO-8859-Latin-1 international set of glyphs. Mostly this is
not necessary, but a number of key applications need special
attention.
This Mini-Howto is intended to tell Danish users how to do this, but
will hopefully be of help to many other people.
If you continue to have troubles after reading this you should try the
German HOWTO, the Keystroke HOWTO for Linux or the ISO 8859-1 FAQ.
They have tips for many applications. Many of the hints contained
herein are cribbed from there. The HOWTOs are available from all
respectable mirrors of sunsite.unc.edu while the ISO 8859-1 FAQ is
available from ftp.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at in /pub/8bit/FAQ-ISO-8859-1.
2. Keyboard setup
2.1. Loading a Danish keytable
Keyboard mappings are in /usr/lib/kbd/keytables/. Try typing either
of these two commands to load one
/usr/bin/loadkeys /usr/lib/kbd/keytables/dk.map
/usr/bin/loadkeys /usr/lib/kbd/keytables/dk-lat1.map
The difference between the two lines is that dk-lat1.map uses `dead'
keys while dk.map doesn't. Dead keys are explained in section ``Dead-
Keys''.
You can change the keymapping loaded at boot by editing the file
/etc/rc.d/rc.keymap.
If this doesn't work you simply haven't installed support for
international keyboards.
2.2. Getting the AltGr key to work under X
Edit the file /etc/Xconfig (under XFree86 2.0) or /etc/X11/XF86Config
(underXFree86 3.x) and make sure the line
RightAlt ModeShift
appears in the Keyboard section. Usually you can do this by uncomment-
ing an appropriate line.
2.3. Dead keys and accented characters
Dead keys are those who don't type anything until you hit another key.
Tildes and umlauts are like this by default under Microsoft Windows
and if you use the dk-lat1.map keymap under Linux.
2.3.1. Removing dead key functionality
Under plain Linux type
loadkeys dk.map
2.3.2. Invoking dead key functionality
o Invoking dead key functionality under plain Linux
Under plain Linux type
loadkeys dk-lat1.map
o Invoking dead key functionality under X11R5 sessions
Insert the following lines in a file ~/.Xmodmap or /etc/X11/Xmodmap
keycode 21 = acute Dgrave_accent bar
keycode 35 = Ddiaeresis Dcircumflex_accent Dtilde
You can now make the dead keys work by typing (e.g.) xmodmap
.Xmodmap. Using the Slackware distribution this commando will be auto-
matically executed next time you run X.
o Invoking dead key functionality under X11R6 sessions
Under X11R6 applications dead keys won't work unless they were
compiled with support for unusual input methods. The only
application reported to do so is kterm - an xterm substitute.
Eventually the situation might improve, but as it is you can't do
much but revert to X11R5 or hack every application you own. Do not
attempt the method described for X11R5.
2.4. Making o (oslash) O (Ooblique) and the dollar sign work
2.4.1. o (oslash) and O (Ooblique)
Find out what keymap you load at boot-up. You should be able to find
out by typing less /etc/rc.d/rc.keymap. On my computer it is called
/usr/lib/kbd/keytables/dk-lat1.map. Find the line for keycode 40 in
this file and change it from
keycode 40 = cent yen
to
keycode 40 = oslash Ooblique
and load the keytable as described in section ``LoadKeys''.
Note: This bug appears to have been fixed in version 0.88 of the
international keytable package.
2.4.2. Dollar sign
The dollar sign is accessed with Shift-4 instead of AltGr-4 by
default. You can fix this by changing the line
keycode 5 = four dollar dollar
in the keymap file to e.g.
keycode 5 = four asciicircum dollar
It doesn't matter if you something else instead asciicircum if it is
just a valid symbol name. See section ``Glyphs'' for a list of valid
symbols.
3. Display and application setup
3.1. International character sets in specific applications
A number of applications demand special attention. This section
descibes how to set up configuration filesfor them.
o bash v.1.13+ : Put the following in your .inputrc file
set meta-flag on
set convert-meta off
set output-meta on
o tcsh: Put the following in your /etc/csh.login or .tcshrc file
setenv LC_CTYPE ISO-8859-1
stty pass8
o less: Set the following environment variable
LESSCHARSET=latin1
o elm: Set the following environment variables
LANG=C
LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1
o emacs: Put the following in your .emacs or the /usr/lib/emacs/site-
lisp/default.el file:
(standard-display-european t)
(set-input-mode (car (current-input-mode))
(nth 1 (current-input-mode))
0)
o TeX / LaTeX: Cribbed from the ISO 8859-1 FAQ by Michael Gschwind
<mike@vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at>:
In LaTeX 2.09, use
\documentstyle[isolatin]{article}
to include support for ISO latin1 characters. In LaTeX2e, the commands
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{isolatin}
will do the job. isolatin.sty is available from all CTAN servers and
from URL ftp://ftp.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at/pub/8bit.
3.2. What characters you can display under Linux
Type dumpkeys -l | less at the prompt to find out what is readily
available. You can map them to your keyboard via the keymap files
mentioned in section ``LoadKeys''.
X11R5 Note: The dead keys don't get the correct names under X11R5 with
this scheme. Generally
dead_* (under plain Linux) => D* or D*_accent (under X11R5)
(i.e. the tilde may be dead_tilde in dk-lat1.map but X11R5 expects the
dead tilde to be called Dtilde.) This does not apply to X11R6.
3.3. Loading the Latin-1 characer set on the console
Execute the following commands under the bash shell:
setfont /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/lat1-16.psf
mapscrn /usr/lib/kbd/consoletrans/trivial
echo -ne '\033(K'
Note: This only has effect under plain Linux. Do not try it under X.
4. Post-amble: Acknowledgements and Copyright
Thanks to Peter Dalgaard, Anders Majland, the authors of the German
Howto and Michael Gschwind for help with several questions.
This Mini-Howto is copyrighted by Thomas Petersen and distributed as
other Linux HOWTOs under the terms described below.
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