GDM should use the preferred layout of the user

[Lionel Dricot]

Binary package hint: gdm

1) Configure your session to use 2 different keyboard layout with the keyboard layout switcher applet. (in my case it was Belgian and French Dvorak Bépo)

2) Set one of your keyboards to be the default one (in my case Fr Dvorak Bépo) and set the keyboard layout to be generic (not window specific).

3) Observe that, depending the order you entered the layout in the chooser, GDM will always propose you by default one of your keyboard layout to enter your password. Unfortunatly, it's not the default (by default, GDM uses belgian keyboard) => BUG

4) In your session, remove the second keyboard (Belgian) and completely remove the switcher applet. You know only have one keyboard layout (Fr Dvorak Bépo)

5) GDM still uses the belgian one by default for my session. => BUG

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. The issue is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug the to the people writting the software (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

What you describe here seems not very obvious, the user session is different from the login banner

[Lionel Dricot (ploum-deactivatedaccount)]

What is not obvious?

The bug is simple : if you have more than one keyboard layout in your session, at login time, GDM will uses one which is not your default one.

Worst : it's only for the first login attempt ! If you fail to enter your password, GDM will automatically change the layout.

Finally, even if you decide to have only one keyboard layout in your session, GDM might decide that your default layout is still the one you should use to type your password.

At the very least, GDM should always use the last layout used by the user to enter his password.

In one word : every morning, when I login, I have to change my layout with my mouse to be able to enter my password.

[Antti S. Lankila (alankila)]

I was about to open a bug just like this one.

In my opinion, the keyboard configuration program should have a way of setting user's preferred keyboard, which applies to GDM as well. My situation was the follows: GNOME always came up with USA keyboard layout, which I then fixed every time by going to the keyboard settings and removing the stupid USA layout and keeping Finnish. This went on for months and frustration mounted. I did everything I thought I could to force Finnish layout to come up by default, including the "apply system-wide" option, but no go, USA layout always appeared.

I finally realized that GDM has 3 controls in the taskpanel area which I never noticed before because they only appear once I have selected an user account and my eyes were invariably focused on the password prompt. One of them is the layout, and it held my hated "USA" choice.

In my experience, having the default come from GDM but having no obvious way to adjust the default from within GNOME is a bug, and there are probably more users like me who can't figure out why GNOME always selects the wrong keyboard layout for them.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

The GUI sets the preference for the user. The system-wide configuration is done elsewhere, I think. As such, I think this ticket should be closed as invalid.

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb)]

I don't know if GDM still doesn't let users to change the keyboard layout, but in any case Gnome should cope with it. Ubuntu now uses LightDM/Unity Greeter and this problem doesn't exist there.