What language do they speak in What?

January 3, 2015 6:07 AM

Looking for a way to switch language to Icelandic in Lubuntu, getting the full Icelandic character set. It would also be very useful to be able to switch between more than four languages like you can in Windows.

The dead key(s) for the Icelandic character set don't seem to work. The best I can do is using the US international keyboard layout, but that doesn't include all the Icelandic characters.
The second issue is that I would like to be able to switch between seven languages and the keyboard layout switcher only allows four to be swapped between using the taskbar keyboard layout switcher. The dead keys don't work anyway, so adding accents isn't working.

Any clues gratefully received, I am not having any luck with Linux fora.

posted by asok to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: Do you need the specific character support, or the associated features (spelling, collation/sort orders, etc) that language environments bring? I don't use lubuntu, but I do use Ubuntu, so I hope the system isn't too lightweight to do what you need.

1. Make sure your system uses Unicode/UTF-8. Using older 8-bit character sets will be a world of pain here. The best way to check is to open a terminal, and type echo $LANG; if it returns something ending in -UTF8, you're good.
2. Enable the Compose key: dunno how to do this under lubuntu; does this work? Compose key.
3. Learn your compose key sequences; they're pretty logical.

With Compose enabled, I can type fun Icelandic characters like đ, Đ, þ, Þ, æ, and Æ without switching language.
posted by scruss at 12:38 PM on January 3, 2015

Response by poster: Using a combination of Keyboard Layout Handler and Lxkeymap (available via Menu>Preferences) it was possible to set the language using Keyboard Layout Handler and then set the keyboard for that language using Lxkeymap to Sun Deadkeys Icelandic. This gave all the Icelandic characters.

That worked for a Dell laptop, but not a Samsung netbook as the Lxkeymap settings were not saved, even if run as root.

No solution so far to the four language limit in Keyboard Layout Handler, but will have to live with that.

Thanks scruss.
posted by asok at 9:46 AM on January 18, 2015