Comment 6 for bug 289928

Can you tell me a bit more about your keyboard and its setup? I notice that you have no keyboard settings in your xorg.conf, but in the Xorg.0.log it is selecting the "fr" keyboard:

(**) AT Translated Set 2 keyboard: xkb_rules: "evdev"
(**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105"
(**) AT Translated Set 2 keyboard: xkb_model: "pc105"
(**) Option "xkb_layout" "fr"
(**) AT Translated Set 2 keyboard: xkb_layout: "fr"
(**) Option "xkb_variant" "oss"
(**) AT Translated Set 2 keyboard: xkb_variant: "oss"

One change that IIRC happened for 8.10 is that the Xorg keyboard settings were taken from the console-setup settings you made during installation. Do you recall if you originally selected a French layout? This could explain why your system defaults to that. As to why it is correct in the logged in session, could it be that you switched it back to qwerty using System > Preferences > Keyboards? If you create a new account, what keyboard does it get?

Please attach your /etc/default/console-setup file. And see if by adjusting the contents of that file, if it fixes the issue on gdm for you.