Keyboard Configuration

If you're the kind of person who thinks that your keyboard configuration in your xorg.conf should be used by Xorg, then read on. If on the other hand you like your settings to be overriden by whatever dbus tells Xorg, then this isn't for you.

This afternoon I updated my Debian unstable system, which amongst quite a few other things upgraded Xorg, I think that package of particular relevance is xserver-xorg 1:7.4+1. This all seemed to go well enough, except that my Japanese keyboard was clearly being used by Xorg as a US keyboard - they letters worked byt most of the symbols didn't.

AFter much messing about and, I noticed that /var/log/Xorg.0.log was reporting that AutoAddDevices was enabled, and that as a result it would ignore the configuration in the xorg.conf for all keyboards, mouses and various other classes of input devices. And a bit further down information about the devices that hal had autodetected, which were almost correct, but not quite.

The following magic tells X to actually use its own configuration for devices. Which has resolved my problem.

Section "ServerFlags"
	Option          "AutoAddDevices" "off"
EndSection