ok so I just installed. And the keyboard was wrong so I went into a setting to try and change it to UK. I found the thign to do it but it was REALLY complicated and asked lots of stuff I didn't really understand. I now have the UK keyboard but it still starts up to US on boot up, and for some reason some but not all menu items are in cyrillic alphabet, presumably russian. How do I change this? The original menu I did it from has disappeared, and I clicked on all of the Russian words as well to see if it was any of them.
I thought that this distro was meant to be friendly for non-techies? All I wanted was to get UK keyboard working- why did it have to be so complicated.

I have tried pressing F2 during boot up which is the only suggestion I could find in the help pages. In Bios it brings up settings that don't include region, and in grub it does nothing.

The easiest thing to do is to set the language on the live system before you install. The live bootloader has an F2-Language menu that sets the locale, the keyboard layout, the repos, and the timezone for you. There is an F3-Timezone menu to set the timezone separately (if you are not in the country associated with the language you selected or if your country has more than one timezone). All of these settings get carried over when you install. If you are booting a LiveUSB via UEFI then select"Custom Boot (with menus)" in the bootloader and you will be given a series of text menus that will let you set the language, timezone, and other things.

Unfortunately, the software that sets these things for you after you install appears to be broken. If you want to avoid reinstalling the I suggest you follow the Debian documentation for setting what you want to set instead of using the broken program.

I've attached a screenshot of what the F2-Language menu looks like in the live bootloader. The"English (UK)" entry is highlighted.

Possibly, in a terminal, (may need sudo), try

I, too, needed to tweak my keyboard setup after installation. I found this easy to do, as long as you don't have to switch locales. This is how I proceeded:

Start Antix Control Center, tab System
Click [Edit Config Files]

Geany opens with, in the right panel, a whole lot of tabs, each one containing a configuration file. Click the left-arrow button on the left of the tabs and go all the way to the beginning of the list.



As you can see (third line of the config file) I use three different keyboard layouts for my one physical Logitech DiNovo keyboard: gb (british english), us (american english) and be (belgian).

The fourth line contains the specific options used for each of these three keyboard layouts: euro for the gb-layout, intl for the us-layout and standard (empty option) for the be-layout.

In addition to this file you may edit (as root) the individual layout files in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols. This is the start of the gb layout file:



In this layout file a physical key is coupled to a logical symbol. The fileformat is pretty easy to understand.

Careful! Always put aside a copy of the original file before you edit it. Even in the edited versions of the files, I never delete content. I make a copy, put it in comment, and edit the copy.

The default layout or language was US and I changed it to UK during installation and I wonder if that meant UKRAINE instead of United Kingdom but I'm not sure. It's weird that only some of the menu items are in English and the others some cyrillic language. 

This is what my Control Centre looks like so I'm going to have problems following corrective procedures:

uk=Ukraine, gb=gb/uk

You are correct,  for keyboard layouts:  uk = Ukrainian while gb = English (UK).   These codes are all listed in the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst.   There is probably an easy way to fix this but I don't know what it is.   This is why I encourage people to set up their live system just as they want it before they install.  If they make a mistake that is hard to recover from then they can just reboot and start over.

anticapitalista wrote: uk=Ukraine, gb=gb/uk

I'm in a pickle (sudo did not help and restarting the PC afterwards did not help). Referring to the UK as Great Britain is arcane! It's not what we call our own country. :(

The loadkeys command only affects the console keymap.  It doesn't affect the language or anything in X Windows.

The *language* you want to use is called"English".  It is not called"Great Britain" or"United Kingdom".  You want the Great Britain variant of the English language which is designated as"en_GB".    Since you've gotten to a console, I recommend trying this:

I'm trying now to reinstall it. The locale is set to en_GB but I don't know what to set the keyboard to if not UK. If UK is the correct answer, I think I will end up with the cyrillic menus again. Here's a video which shows the keyboard choices: there doesn't seem to be a very cohesive naming convention! 

 
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://youtu.be/N9qCYzmzf80"
linktext was:"https://youtu.be/N9qCYzmzf80"
====================================


Should I just select UK and try to use the terminal to fix it?

No.  As  we told you before, use"gb" for the keyboard in X-Windows.  If you don't believe me, look at the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst.   For the keyboard layout in the virtual consoles use"loadkeys uk". 

If you are going to re-install anyway then select the language"English (UK)" in the F2 menu of the live bootloader and all of this should get taken care of for you automatically.   If you are booting via UEFI then choose the default "Customize Boot (text menus)" option and select "English (UK)" in the language menu.  Otherwise, make sure you restart X for changes due to update-locale to take effect, but even then, it won't change all of the desktop menus in an existing user account.

Yes, naming conventions have changed over years.  That's why we try to set it all up for you automatically when you boot the live system.   The convention for languages is pretty consistent but things drift astray with keyboard layouts.  For example, there is a X keyboard layout for Irish that uses the code"ie" so using the code"gb" for the rest of the UK does make some sense, at least to me.   I don't know of an Irish keyboard layout for the console keyboard so using"uk" there also makes sense.

The Cyrillic letters have nothing to do with the keyboard layouts.  The letters that appear in programs and menus are controlled by the locale and by the language choice made when you booted the live system.

I think I screwed up the video link making it unwatchable. But I fixed it now and it shows that there is no GB option in the keyboard menu.

I didn't think to change the language when loading the live image because who would? It seemed to be English and I didn't know it would be so difficult to proceed afterwards. Given the time it takes to do all this on an 800 MHz processor, I'm reluctant to restart though!

Open the Control Centre
Click the 4th one down (Session)
Click the top left icon (change keyboard)
Select the 3rd one down (British)

EDIT: In your video, select uk

Thanks. I'm pretty sure I made the same selections during the first installation attempt but the second installation attempt produced the expected/desired results so I don't know what happened.