Keyboards for GNOME and KDE

GNOME and KDE offer keyboard-switching applications that can be added to the panel or dock. While these are simply wrappers around the functionality offered by xkb, they do offer the convenience of being able to switch keyboard layouts by a mouse-click on the panel, plus the keyboard layout currently in use is easily visible.

For GNOME, you can add the keyboard switching applet to the panel by right-clicking on a blank area of the panel, and then choosing Add to Panel -> Utility -> Keyboard Layout Switcher. Bring up the preferences dialog by right-clicking on the applet and choosing Preferences. Typically, only the default keyboard will be shown the first time. Click on the Add button at the top right, select Oriya -> India -> Oriya xkb keymap, and click Add followed by Close to add the Oriya Inscript keymap. By default, this uses the layout in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/pc/ori, i.e., the old Karunakar layout. So, in order to use the ori_inscript xkb map, highlight the Oriya xkb map entry, and click Properties to modify it. This brings up a dialog window in which you should replace `setxkbmap ori' with `setxkbmap ori_inscript -option "lv3:switch"' for the Command string. Close all dialog windows. Now, you can switch through all keymaps added to the Keyboard Layout Switcher by clicking on the applet, or by pressing Alt+Shift. The current keyboard layout is indicated by the flag and/or label used by the applet. While this makes it convenient to enter multi-lingual text, it is possible to get confused if there are a large number of keyboards added to the switcher.

KDE has a similar application, the KDE keyboard tool. This might already be in your system tray, and would show up as a small square labelled, e.g., ``us.'' Right-click on the icon, and choose Configure to install the Oriya keymap. Else, it can be accessed by starting the KDE control center (KDE menu -> Settings -> Control Center), and choosing Regional & Accessibility -> Keyboard Layout from within it in order to configure the keyboard tool. The Layout tab shows two panes, the left-hand one with the available layouts and the right-hand pane for the active layouts. Layouts can be activated by highlighting available ones and clicking on Add. Selecting one of the active keymaps displays the command used to install it at the bottom of the configuration dialog. Replace the default command for the Oriya layout, `setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout ori -variant basic' with `setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout ori_inscript -option "lv3:switch"' to use our modified Oriya Inscript keymap that was copied to /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/pc/ori_inscript. Note that you have to click on the icon in the system tray to switch between layouts, as Alt+Shift does not seem to switch layouts, at least in my version of KDE.