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Change keyboard layout to US International

January 20, 2010 - 10:19pm — Xuan Ngo

The following instructions show how to change keyboard layout to US International so that you can type accent characters.

  1. Run the following:
    dpkg-reconfigure console-data
  2. Select qwerty->US american->Standard->US International (ISO 8859-1).
  3. Run the following to activate the Compose Key:
    setxkbmap us -variant alt-intl
  4. Now, on the console, press ' and e, you will get é.
  5. The setxkbmap command only temporarily activates the Compose key. To make it permanent, add the following right below Option "XkbLayout" "us" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:
    Option "XkbVariant" "alt-intl"