Keyboard mapping selection comes to late during install

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 8:10 AM, Alain-Olivier Breysse
<yahoe.001 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bonjour,
>
> Keyboard mapping selection comes too late during installation. When one
> wants to manually partition the drives on, for example, a French-Canadian
> keyboard, the key mapping selection window hasn't been presented yet (it
> will be after the time zone selection) thus obliging the user to manually
> call for that change which is not even possible if Ubiquity as been started
> directly during the boot process without selecting the "Try Ubuntu" option.
>
>
> This is not a bug but a choice made by the developper that needs to be
> adresssed and corrected since it affects all international users.

Do you mean this happens when you select the French language (for
instance), as soon as the CD starts, once you've first pressed a key
to get to the menu?

I find it's often easier to install a system with the French-Canadian
settings if you first boot with everything in English (e.g. keep
english as the language at the boot menu, select Install Ubuntu), then
select French for the language once you're presented with Ubiquity's
language selection / welcome dialog.

What this effectively does is keep you in English until the language
is changed in Ubiquity, but also leaves the system with a qwerty
keyboard layout (e.g. US English) rather than azerty, as I guess is
the precise issue you're referring to. The side effect is that you
won't be able to type accents very easily.

Otherwise, at the boot menu, select French for the language, and press
F3 (IIRC) to get to the keyboard selection list. You should be able to
select another layout from there.

I don't think it's feasible to please everyone in this case: for the
French language (as it is the case here), people from France will most
likely want the French azerty layout; people from Canada will want one
of the French Canadian qwerty layouts or US/Intl; and people from
other french-speaking nations are likely to have different
requirements as well. Whatever default layout is choosen is bound to
make people unhappy ;)

Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu-tl at ubuntu.com>
Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: mathieu.tl at gmail.com
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