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I've just switched from LXDE to Gnome and I'm struggling with configuring the keyboard the way I want it. The Swedish keyboard layout is painful when programming (e.g. {[]} require right-hand finger acrobatics) so I've remapped them using xkbcomp.

Under LXDE/LXDM I could have the mapping happen automatically on login by putting it in ~/.xprofile. This doesn't work under Gnome/GDM though. /etc/gdm/Xsession, which GDM uses to launch gnome-session, does source ~/.xprofile, but by the time I'm logged in and starting a terminal the mappings have been undone. I'm guessing something that gnome-session or one of its cohorts undoes my careful changes to the keyboard map.

I suppose I need to somehow make my changes at a later stage in the login process, but I've not managed to find a way to achieve that. How can I do that?

(Alternatively, is there a way to add user keyboard layouts that get picked up by the Gnome3 keyboard layout settings dialogue? Or failing that, how can I add layouts in the system?)

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Have you tried using .bashrc or .profile? – terdon Jan 4 at 10:20
I have tried running /etc/gdm/Xsession in a login shell with no luck. Just adding it to either of those files will require that I start a terminal before the mappings are active, which isn't ideal since I do quite a bit of my development in Eclipse. – Magnus Jan 4 at 10:28
Adding it to ~/.profile should cause it to be run on login, adding it to ~/.bashrc will require a terminal since it is only read for non-login shells. See here. – terdon Jan 4 at 11:53
The big question is when during login. When looking more closely at my system's /etc/gdm/Xsession it sources both ~/.profile and ~/.xprofile (in that order), so moving stuff from ~/.xprofile to ~/.profile is pointless. Unless of course, gnome-session itself sources ~/.profile but not ~/.xprofile, which it doesn't according to my tests just now. – Magnus Jan 4 at 14:02
Hmm... OK, how about the ugly hack of making eclipse an alias to something like source ~/.xprofile && ecplipse? – terdon Jan 4 at 14:23
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1 Answer

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Silly me! After a bit of thinking I found a good and easy way of doing it:

  1. Copy the contents of ~/.xprofile into a script somewhere. Make sure it's executable.
  2. Start gnome-session-properties and add a new startup program. Point it to the script.

That's it.

Much easier than fiddling around with special dot-files that are sourced on login, really :)

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