How to display keyboard switcher? [SOLVED]

[Member Mynaardt]

Hi there!

I have just installed antiX 19.2 on an aging computer.

I’m used to using Xfce as a DE, and I like having the keyboard switcher on the panel. I don’t need it often, but it is handy.

Is there some way of doing this with IceWM, Fluxbox, and/or JWM?

Thanks in advance!

PS: I have several questions for this install, so I’m posting one message per question. Not trying to flood the forums here.

• This topic was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Mynaardt.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Mynaardt.

What have the Romans ever done for us?
Apart from: sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water, and public health?

[Anonymous]

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PPC created a “tray icon manager” and (or so I thought, from memory) it’s included in the antiX19 distribution.
Launch antiX Control Center and look for it there.

whoops, as of Sept 3, 2020 –} https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/jwm-desktop-users-usuarios-da-area-de-trabalho-jwm/#post-41051

.
.
Reading your question reminds me: certain details in this doc might now be outdated
http://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/docs-antiX-19/FAQ/icewm.html

[Moderator caprea]

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A keyboard switcher in the taskbar should appear when go to
control-centre > session > Configuration of the user session

In the startup-file remove the hash mark like this under
# Puts a flag on the taskbar to show which keyboard is being used if more than 1 keyboard layout is detected
fbxkb-start &

[Member oops]

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caprea wrote:

A keyboard switcher in the taskbar should appear when go to
control-centre > session > Configuration of the user session

In the startup-file remove the hash mark like this under
# Puts a flag on the taskbar to show which keyboard is being used if more than 1 keyboard layout is detected
fbxkb-start &

… Right, and before usually setxkbmap for example:

setxkbmap fr,us &
# Puts a flag on the taskbar to show which keyboard is being used if more than 1 keyboard layout is detected
fbxkb-start &

[Member Mynaardt]

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Hi again, all:

I just stumbled on some old notes (on file, not paper) I’d made about this a couple of years ago and misplaced.

What my notes said should work is this:

setxkbmap -option grp:switch,grp:shifts_toggle,grp_led:scroll 'ca(eng),es,epo' &
fbxkb-start &

What that’s supposed to do is show the keyboard changer on the taskbar, defaulting to the Canadian flag (for English), and then using both shift keys to shift between English, Spanish, and Esperanto keyboard.s

Unfortunately, the changer did not show up on the task bar…

So I feel like I’m almost there, but am missing something that’s probably easily overlooked.

Any suggestions about how what it should look like in the configuration file?

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Mynaardt.

What have the Romans ever done for us?
Apart from: sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water, and public health?

[Moderator BobC]

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I tried it in a terminal and it seemed epo had problems giving me error “kbd group numbring is not contiguous”. Would br or pt be ok instead?

To see the complete list
leafpad /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/eudev.lst

In a terminal, this worked…

setxkbmap ‘us,ca(eng),es,br’
fbxkb

therefore, I would try in a terminal, and then put in .desktop-session/startup once it worked with the space and & added. Note that I didn’t use fbxkb-start because that didn’t work.

setxkbmap ‘us,ca(eng),es,br’ &
fbxkb &

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by BobC.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by BobC.

[Member Mynaardt]

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Hi, BobC …

That mostly work. But no joy on the Esperanto keyboard.

The pt(nativo-epo) and br(nativo-epo) mostly worked. Unfortunately those Portuguese keyboard layouts were completely unfamiliar to me. Trying to type ‘a’ gave me an ‘i’, for example.

I tried everything I could think of from the long list of keyboard variants, but no joy on the Esperanto front. Oh well, I’ll just have to live with it. I don’t really need, Esperanto, it’s just a nice to have kind of thing, that’s all.

This worked, though:

setxkbmap -option grp:switch,grp:shifts_toggle,grp_led:scroll 'ca(eng),es' &
fbxkb-start &

Same as I had before, but skipping the ‘epo’ option.

Thanks for the help, everyone…

What have the Romans ever done for us?
Apart from: sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water, and public health?

[Moderator BobC]

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I did try. I think someone that uses an Esperanto keyboard might be able to help you better. I saw there was no epo.png flag, but adding one didn’t solve the issue.

Have you ever used epo on antiX successfully before? I did find a variant called epo(legacy) but that didn’t work, either. I don’t know what the error message means.

“kbd group numbering is not continuous”

[Moderator BobC]

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I found another way that might work for you. There is another keyboard switcher program called gxkb that accepted epo without giving an error. It displayed a ? icon for the Canadian and Esperanto flags, but at least the option came up. It takes 4 mb more memory than fbxkb to run. The gxkb package is already in the repos and can be installed with Synaptic or Apt, and you would run it instead of fbxkb.

I found that if you use root authority to add a flag pic epo.png to /usr/share/gxkb/flags it will then display on the list. I didn’t figure out how to get the Canadian flag to appear for ca(eng) though.

Its website is:
https://github.com/zen-tools/gxkb

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