elblogg

One of the questions about linux I get most frequently is How do I get norwegian keys (æøå) to work in terminals and console in Debian?

Until very recently I couldn’t answer them. I dont use Debian on my desktop (I use Debian on servers), so I have never had that problem. So, today I sat down at a sparc machine at etjenesten, wich had Debian installed, and did not have norwegian keyset or locale. I decided to find out how to fix it, and fix it.

Here’s a howto

To fix this permanently you’ll need superuser ritght (you’ll have to be root).

We start with the console. To set keyboard settings in console you type

dpkg-reconfigure console-data

and press enter.
You will now get a screen where you can select different options. Select Select codemap from full list and press enter.
Now you’ll get a list of avaliable keymaps. In my case I would select sparc / Type 4 / Norwegian / Standard / Standard (the keyboard is Type 6, but Type 4 seems to work fine). In most cases you would choose pc / qwerty / Norwegian / Standard / latin1. Press enter. Reboot, and you’ll have nice norwegian keys in your console.

Now, terminals. To get norwegian keys in terminals you’ll have to set the locale of your system to norwegian. To do this, type

dpkg-reconfigure locales

and press enter.
Select no_NO ISO-8859-1, nb_NO ISO-8859-1 or nn_NO ISO-8859-1 from the list and OK.
Then select no_NO (or whatever you chose on the last screen) as default locale on the next screen, and OK.

You’re done. Restart X, log out and in again and you’ll have your keys.

For those of you who dont have Norwegian keys in X at all. I’ll make a howto for this later. until then, you can fix it temporarily with

setxkbmap no

.