Russian keyboard layout on French keyboard (debian 8.3)

Question

I have laptop Lenovo Z51-70 with french keyboard (keys and their position, because french keyboard have little differ keys combination).

To use correctly "classic" qwerty-english layout i use "mac layout" (on another i have problem with missing ' on [%ù] button), to use azerty-french layout i use latin9 (legacy, alternative). But with russian biggest problem - i missing

, .

on [/?]/[.,] key (on my keyboard this key have icon [§!]) in Mac-layout or in Legacy layout. Normally (windows style for normal keyboard) in english this button gives

/?

in russian in gives

,.

but mine in russian mode gives same keys like in english layout.

So: which layout i can use on french keyboard to have all russian keys on it? Or maybe it's possible to edit layout (change what key return)?

Answer 1

Usually in your keyboard settings, you can set the 'Layout', which can be different from your physical keyboard layout.

Assuming that the two layouts (the one you selected in your settings, and your physical keyboard) have the same number of keys, this should work without issue (although your key caps won't match their output anymore). For example, I do this on my machine from time to time so my US QWERTY keyboard behaves like a French AZERTY keyboard, so I can get the accents that are missing in the QWERTY layout. The Wikipedia images of the French and Russian keyboards look like you should be able to do this too.

French keyboard -> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Belgian_pc_keyboard.svg/500px-Belgian_pc_keyboard.svg.png
Russian keyboard -> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/KB_Eng-Rus_QWERTY(%D0%99%D0%A6%D0%A3%D0%9A%D0%95%D0%9D).svg/400px-KB_Eng-Rus_QWERTY(%D0%99%D0%A6%D0%A3%D0%9A%D0%95%D0%9D).svg.png

Answer 2

So.. solution how to get [.,] on [!§] key on french AZERTY keyboard with rus(legacy) layout:

via root open file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ru and add

key <AB10> { [       period,       comma  ] };

in section:

xkb_symbols "legacy" {

So finally it will be:

partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "legacy" {

    include "ru(common)"
    name[Group1]= "Russian (legacy)";
    key <AB10> { [       period,       comma  ] };
};

After reboot french AZERTY keyboard on rus-legacy layout will work like russian/english keyboard on rus-legacy layout.