Comment 9 for bug 211892

There are actually several different settings for keyboards, and I wonder if perhaps with setxkbmap it attempts to fill in the missing values for you, whereas if setting in xorg.conf if you have to specify them explicitly?

To debug it further, try using `setxkbmap -print` to determine the keycodes, geometry, etc. and then set them accordingly in xorg.conf using the Xkb settings (see man kbd).

If that doesn't work, then please feel free to reopen this bug and update the description appropriately, and we can take a deeper look.