Hello,
(scroll down to the post scriptum if in a hurry! There you'll find a short instruction.)


after installing antiX 15 (rox-icewm) on an old desktop machine, customizing conky a little bit and muddling around with the theme for some days, I decided to do something different for a while.

As I've been to Montenegro this summer and plan to visit the former Yugoslav countries again in future I decided to learn some Serbocroatian (please no politics or linguistic dispute here). And why not using the fresh installed system for this. I'll mostly stick to the Latin characters but will have to use the Serbian cyrillic keyboard layout also.

And, oh, here's where my quest began. Trying to add the layout with on-board tools I had to find out that the serbian-cyrillic layout is not offered as an option. Googling and searching this forum for quite a while I found I had to edit"/ etc/default/keyboard".


I changed:
XKBLAYOUT="de,us" to XKBLAYOUT="de,us,rs"


After saving and rebooting the keyboard switcher in the taskbar showed some question marks as third option which led me to the (wrong) conclusion that the keyboard layout was not installed.

At that point I started searching the net again for a solution which would only install the layout without all of the other localization stuff. And, being unsuccessful, I began writing about my problem to start a new thread here. While writing and trying to describe my problem as accurately as I could (I'm a nitpicker, well.., sometimes) I changed the layout with the switcher, typed a few characters to leafpad and... good God, it was in fact changing the keyboard layout!

What next? I wanted some icon to show up in the taskbar instead of question marks. So I tryed to locate the folder where the icons are stored and what was wrong with it. Again, this was very time consuming and again not much information to find. But I succeded at last.

I found the icons in"/usr/share/fbxkb/images" and there was no icon"rs.png". Of course the switcher couldn't find it. Next I created the icon myself using Gimp and copied it to the folder. Attention! You have to have the permission to place files there. Either you open Gimp as root (terminal: gksudo gimp) or open a file manager as root and copy your own file there.

Ok, reboot, and that's it!


Finally, after solving the keyboard-layout problem, I decided to post it anyway. Being a newbie I spoiled a whole day with it, maybe you can do it in 10 minutes with this infos.



PS: TIME IS MONEY-version:

1) Edit"/ etc/default/keyboard"
change: XKBLAYOUT="??,us" to XKBLAYOUT="??,us,??"
(whatever layouts and order you may need here)

2) Save the file and reboot.

3) Control if you can type according to chosen layout
and if the flag (or whatever) is there.

(Only if your flag shouldn't show:)

4) Control if a ??.png file is found in:
"/usr/share/fbxkb/images"
if not:
Create or download a PNG-flag and copy it to the folder.
(it has to be renamed to ??.png if necessary)

5) Reboot. That's it!

Oh, do I have to mark this as solved? And if so, how..?

Thanks for the easy-to-follow instructions.

For marking"solved", you can edit your post#1. As part of the edit, you are able to change the topic title.