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I have a Macbook Pro 7.1 with a French keyboard. I'm trying to install a Debian 6 guest OS using VirtualBox on it and I can't configure the keyboard as it is in OS X.

I tried dpkg-reconfigure console-data and selected the mac-usb-fr layout. Everything works well... besides the special characters (pound and arobase signs for example - first key under Esc).

When I select the Apple Macintosh Int'l layout using the keyboard settings in Gnome, I get an error dialog.

I also tried to edit /etc/default/console-setup and add these lines:

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="fr"
XKBVARIANT="mac"
XKBOPTIONS="lv3:switch,compose:lwin"

And these in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Driver          "kbd"
Option          "CoreKeyboard"
Option          "XkbRules"      "xorg"
Option      "XkbVariant"    "mac"
Option          "XkbModel"      "pc105"
Option          "XkbLayout"     "fr"
Option          "XkbOptions"    "lv3:rwin_switch,apple:badmap"

Same error dialog when I reboot.

One surprising thing is that it works perfectly out of the box with Ubuntu, so I guess the problem has been solved. Maybe I am missing a specific package?

Following the steps here worked for me: http://wiki.debian.org/MacBook#Keyboard.

I simply edited this file:

# /etc/default/keyboard
XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="fr"
XKBVARIANT="mac"
XKBOPTIONS="lv3:switch,compose:lwin"

And after a reboot, the mappings were good.

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If you have a solution, post it as an answer below ("Answer your Question"), then you can mark it as accepted in two days. That way, everybody will see the answer right away and the question is marked as answered. – slhck Jul 24 '11 at 18:36
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