From Fedora Project Wiki

Key i18n questions

Where are you?

What country are you in?

What timezone are you in? What timezone do you want your hardware and system clocks set to?

What is your nationality?

What language(s) do you read and write in?

What keyboard layout(s) do you use? How do you switch layouts?

Pre-Fedora 18 situation

  • Anaconda: hand-weeded names for locales, hand-weeded list of available keyboard layouts, database of relationships between locales and keyboard layouts, system-setup-keyboard applied actual console and X configs based on the selection from anaconda's hand-weeded layout list
  • /etc/sysconfig/keyboard
  • /etc/sysconfig/i18n
  • system-config-language
  • system-config-keyboard
  • system-setup-keyboard
  • GNOME? KDE? Xfce?

Fedora 18+ situation

  • Anaconda: locale names automatic, keyboard layout list derived from xkb via libxklavier, simple heuristic to try and determine single 'appropriate' keyboard layout for any given locale, anaconda writes out only X keyboard config and relies on systemd to write a console keyboard config
  • /etc/vconsole.conf
  • /etc/locale.conf
  • localectl
  • GNOME? KDE? Xfce?

Configuration architecture

Locale

Timezone

Keyboard layout

Areas of concern

Anaconda welcome screen: "What country are you in?" vs. "What language(s) do you read and write in?"

"Chinese (Simplified)", "Chinese (Traditional)" vs. "Chinese (China)", "Chinese (Taiwan)", "Chinese (Hong Kong)", "Chinese (Singapore)" - [1] , [2] , [3]

Anaconda welcome screen: "Set keyboard to default layout for selected language.'"

Locales where it is typical to have multiple X keymaps configured: [4]

Anaconda: loss of pre-F18 knowledge of locale -> keyboard configuration associations

system-config-keyboard entirely broken in Fedora 18

[10]

systemd / keyboard layouts: conversion xkb<->kbd is bad and creaky, we need xkb layouts on console