ArchLinux how to setup English Language with german keyboardlayout

Question

Can anyone explain me how to setup up ArchLinux to be completely in English except for the KeyboardLayout? (it should be de-latin1-nodeadkeys)

Solution 1

To get system where your locale is en_US.UTF-8 (assuming you want utf-8, which is recommended) and keyboard layout in both X.Org and virtual consoles is de-latin1-nodeadkeys, do these steps:

• uncomment line "en_US.UTF-8" from /etc/locale.gen (e.g. sed -i 's/#en_US.UTF-8/en-US.UTF-8/' /etc/locale.gen)
• locale-gen
• echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
• localectl set-keymap de-latin1-nodeadkeys
• localectl set-x11-keymap de-latin1-nodeadkeys

Sidenote: localectl set-keymap writes given keymap to /etc/vconsole.conf to variable KEYMAP.

Solution 2

There are european standards that you may want to have on your system, like

• metric system
• 24h time format
• week starting with monday
• date in ISO-8601
• comma as decimal mark
• paper size A4
• euro as currency

If you want english language and also the above standards, you may want to consider to use danish english instead of us english. To do so, just generate and use the locale en_DK.UTF-8 instead of en_US.UTF-8.

To use german keyboard layout:

echo KEYMAP=de-latin1 > /etc/vconsole.conf

More about this can be found in the german arch wiki.

Comments

[wigeon]

so as locale I should use en-US and the keyboardlayout gets configured in the xorg.conf?

[darnir]

Precisely. That's how you'd do it

[Timur Fayzrakhmanov]

Thank you for the answer! But here is the question: is localectl set-keymap is the same as manually edit /etc/vconsole.conf and set KEYMAP=de-latin1-nodeadkeys? By the way, is there analogue with set-X11-keymap?

[rbaleksandar]

Literally did everything step by step and it didn't work - keyboard is still en_US and not de_DE.

[rbaleksandar]

Yeah, after looking for more information I came across the same conclusion. Thanks for sharing though!