How to deploy a custom keyboard layout?

Question

I was using the Bulgarian New Phonetic layout for cyrillic, but I am accustomed to touch-typing on a QWERTZ layout, so all the symbols are in the wrong place. So I decided to make my own layout in KDE.

I found the /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols files, and added a new mapping to the one called "bg". I just copied and pasted the block called "new phonetic", changed the name to "phonetic qwertz" and changed the symbols as I need them. I hoped that after a restart, I will find a new type of layout in the list of available keyboard layouts, and will be able to change to it. Sadly, this wasn't the case. It seems that I have to tell my system that a new layout exists, but I don't know how. Existing questions don't explain what to do with the file after it has been modified.

How can I deploy my new layout and use it?

Answer 1

Inspecting the source code reveals that kcm_keyboard reads /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.xml for the metadata. Register your new variant there.

Answer 2

I did this a while ago and remember I had to update

• base.lst,
• base.xml,
• evdev.lst, and
• evdev.xml,

which are all in the rules directory, on Slackware it's /etc/X11/xkb/rules.

It's possible that it would work with fewer updated files (I don't remember how much I tested), but updating these four definitely worked.