No pipe symbol in Ubuntu 11.04 running in Windows 7 x64 VirtualBox

Question

For some reason I cannot type a pipe(|) symbol with US keyboard in Ubuntu while I can do it in Windows 7 which also uses US keyboard. Normally I use left-shift with the button next to it to type a pipe symbol, but in Ubuntu it creates < and > with shift (like "shift+," and "shift+." are already doing).

Solution 1

I fixed this for my Dell keyboard by running

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

and selecting the most similar keyboard (SK-7100, I think - my actual keyboard is a SK-8165) and guessing sensible options for the other questions (in my case, UK layout, extended-winkeys, no compose).

This was for Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS 64-bit on VMWare 4.04, host: Windows 7 64-bit.

Solution 2

Try this

1. Hold down the ALT key
2. Enter 1,2,4 on the numeric keyboard (you might need to activate it via the Num Locktoggle key)
3. Release the ALT key

Hope this helps

Solution 3

If you can’t type pipe (|) then change keyboard layout

command is : setxkbmap us

It's work for me

Comments

[Rahul Virpara]

this one worked for me.

[lukescammell]

This also worked for me – slightly hard to believe that you still need to do this in Ubuntu in 2014! Thank you.

[Andrew Fielden]

And you have to it after every kernel update

[DNA]

@AndrewFielden Thanks, that's a shame but useful to know! Might be possible to automate it - see stackoverflow.com/questions/8671308/…

[Suzana]

This also solved my problem of not being able to type ~ (tilde) and | (pipe) on a German keyboard in Ubuntu 12.04.

[Guy Starbuck]

Thank you, that is super useful - my keyboard somehow got set to Romanian, so pipe and colon symbols didn't render correctly. This fixed the problem!