How to put the keyboard in Spanish in Arch Linux

Darkcrizt

2 minutes

Keyboard

Among the most common problems that arise after installing Arch Linux, is that the keyboard layout is in English. So for us Latinos in the majority, it is not functional since the keymap we use is that of the Spanish language.

Although during the installation process we set the language in the vconsole.conf file, for some strange reason this change is not saved and when starting the system the keymap is by default in the English language.

To change the keyboard layout to the Spanish language, it is simple, it does not require much.

The first will be open a terminal and grant super user permissions to proceed to type in the terminal:

The first thing that will be to check, what configuration we have for the keymap:

localectl status

System Locale: LANG=es_ES.utf8

LC_NUMERIC=es_ES.UTF-8

LC_TIME=es_ES.UTF-8

LC_MONETARY=es_ES.UTF-8

LC_PAPER=es_ES.UTF-8

LC_MEASUREMENT=es_ES.UTF-8

VC Keymap: es

X11 Layout: es

Here I share some methods to be able to change the keymap in our distribution.

One of them would be, edit the vconsole.conf file to put the keyboard in Spanish, we edit it with nano:

nano /etc/vconsole.conf

And inside the file we will write the following:

KEYMAP=es

Another method is to edit the 10-keymap.fdi file

Then with nano we edit this file:

nano /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi

Already inside the file we look for this line:

us

and we replace the "us" by "es" with what would be like this:

es

The last one is to edit is another file.

nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf

In this file we look for the following:

Section "InputClass"Identifier "evdev keyboard catchall"

MatchIsKeyboard "on"

MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"

Driver "evdev"

EndSection

Between MatchDevicePath and Driver we put the following:

Option "XkbLayout" "es"

We reboot and we already have our keyboard layout configured.

It should be noted that this tutorial is only valid for Spanish in Spain, not in South America.


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  1.   Daniel said
    ago 6 years

    Very good article, the keyboard sometimes gets complicated. Greetings.

    Reply to Daniel
  2.   Luis Church said
    ago 6 years

    Very good article, very useful.

    In case it helps anyone, here is another reference on how to change the keyboard language to Spanish with the most common Linux distributions:

    http://www.sysadmit.com/2017/12/linux-configurar-teclado-espanol.html

    Reply to Luis Iglesia
  3.   juan carlos said
    ago 4 years

    I finally got it, Arch Linux is fantastic for all these things.
    Thank you very much, I could not get the terminal to be in Spanish and I have seen a lot of pages.
    Creating the file [vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf], I was able once and for all, I have copied the file as it is in the tutorial, because it did not exist.
    Thank you very much

    Reply to juan carlos