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Fascinating discoveries in Void (GNU)/Linux!

For a long, long time I thought about Void Linux as an interesting, but not practical distro. The main reason for that was, that I wasn't able to figure out how to set a german keyboard layout in the display manager everytime I tried it -- but now I got it!

Void Linux uses LXDM by default, at least when you install from the livecd with Xfce. The problem is, that the installer of Void asks you about a keymap, but as it seems it sets it only for the virtual terminal (no X11). The keyboard settings of Xfce on the other hand only count for the users logged into the Xfce session. All in all: It is not that easy to set a system-wide keyboard layout for the display manager/greeter:

I tried setting it via the X11 config files stored in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d and also copied them to /etc/... (because the /etc/-directory will be read before the /usr/-directory on system startup, at least by default). But it did not went well -- the keyboard was still an american layout.

Fortunately I discovered the LXDM config file stored under /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf. There you can actually specify that LXDM shows a keyboard-layout-switch option on its greeter. Therefor you have to set keyboard=0 to keyboard=1.

Debian is and will be my favourite distribution. But this is quite a discovery for somebody who just did not find this option in the past. :)

Update: Appearantly, if you create a file called /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-keyboard.conf with the following lines, it does actually change the keyboard layout as I want it:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "keyboard"
        MatchIsKeyboard "yes"
        Option "XkbLayout" "de"
        Option "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
EndSection

(for a de_nodeadkeys layout)

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/130858/change-the-keyboard-layout-in-lightdm#131030

By the way: I changed the display manager to lightdm, it's just way better (sorry LXDM) -- for example it solves another problem: While using LXDM it did not change the cursor theme correctly on most applications.

If you want to change the display manager, you have to delete the lxdm entry in /var/service (probably it's also a good idea to remove the package). Then you can create the new runit service with the command 'ln -s /etc/sv/=name-of-dm=' (creating a new symbolic link).

https://old.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/kn5u8s/how_to_change_default_display_manager/