Comment 3 for bug 881222

I've upgraded to Precise and the issue continues. This is what I've done since then without results that stick.

Thinking that the problem is linked to the fact that I uninstalled other-than-English language support with BleachBit, I did the following. reinstalled language-selector-gnome reinstalled language-pack-en-base

I went back to now called Keyboard Layout and the + button is still faded.

I even went so far as to add Spanish locale to see if I could add another layout, but this didn't make a difference. I can't add any layouts to the ones I already have installed (US alternative, US International, English Mac, and the International alt/Gr version).

I tried the following: dpkg-reconfigure locales update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Although it did seem to update my locale settings, when I went back to the now called Keyboard Layout, the + button was still faded.

I haven't tried dpkg-reconfigure localeconfig because this is not installed and apparently xkeyboard-config is an eol.

xkb-data looks promissing from the read in software-center: "This package contains configuration data used by the X Keyboard Extension (XKB), which allows selection of keyboard layouts when using a graphical interface."

A quick wajig reinstall xkb-data proved my hopes wrong.

It seems the only thing that temporarily allowed me to install more layouts was sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration. I selected the colemak layout to see if took. I ran it but by the time I rebooted, the change didn't stick. Plugging in an external keyboard also makes colemak in the applet disappear.

The strange thing about using dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration is that the app menu applet shows the change but System Settings --> Keyboard Layout doesn't. It always shows the eternal US alternative, US International, English Mac, and the International alt/Gr layouts. And I can never add a layout through this pane.

I just reinstalled iso-codes, and for a few minutes I saw that the keyboard Unity "applet" showed colemak I had installed previously with. I relogged back in and it was gone but colemak shows in cat /etc/default/keyboard but not in Xorg. A quick alt+cntl F1 show me that it did take, only in console.

"XKBMODEL="pc104" XKBLAYOUT="us" XKBVARIANT="colemak" XKBOPTIONS="terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"

Somehow I don't think sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration was meant to (only?) change the console layout.

I'm just reading /etc/default/keyboard and it says the following.

If you change any of the following variables and X is configured to use this file, then the changes will become visible to X only if udev is restarted. You may need to reboot the system.

I can assume that X is listening, at least until I reboot, when changes are thrown away. So, I assume there is a conflict between more than one file or sets of files as to which layouts take predominance.

Any ideas anyone? This one has me stumped.