I installed Manjaro KDE on an old Macbook Pro 12.1 (Yosemite).
It’s my first time working with Linux on a Mac, and while installation went fine and seems to work well, I’m not able to determine how to type special characters?
output of localectl status:
System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_TIME=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_NAME=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=nb_NO.UTF-8
VC Keymap: no
X11 Layout: no
X11 Variant: mac
On installation I chose the keyboard layout closest to what I think I have: Apple Macbook/Macbook Pro, Norwegian. The upper left key below esc is actually key marked with § and ', while it returns § and |, otherwise it seems to work as intended.
In System Settings > Virtual Keyboard there is an entry marked “None”, while I do have libfakekey and qt5-virtualkeyboard installed. Otherwise the installation is “Vanilla”, all packages are from official repos and none from AUR. The only tweak I made so far was replacing the horrible start menu with the excellent Legacy Application Launcher
Both Command buttons opens the start menu and seems to work like the Meta key on windows-like layouts.
Thankful for any input on how to achieve special characters like ¡@£$½¥{[]}±´¬¿°»«÷⅝‰¼³²¹ and so on.
EDIT: Solved by installing Onboard and switching from Wayland session to X11
I’m on a macbook with English International keyboard. Out of habit I always use virtual keyboards and Onboard runs on all my machines as startup app, appearing minimised on the panel or as a floating icon.
Very customisable and click-and-hold opens a menu that provides all characters needed.
Testing Onboard, while looking nice, it closes / crashes as soon as I click any letter.
Testing with my newer HP laptop (“windows” keyboard, also Manjaro KDE) it works like a charm.
On the Macbook, there are some keyboard shortcuts (from the physical keyboard) that only works in certain contiditons. If the desktop is “active”, F12 will not open yakuake - I also tried with guake which I like better, same problem. The shortcut is working when Firefox is active, but not when using LibreOffice. I guess I’ll start separate threads for those issues, but can it be my hardware is too old for Manjaro? How old are your macs?
Old? Mine’s a 5,4 from 2009 but I’m on XFCE minimal and I keep things as simple as possible. Anyway, yes, onboard can be a little laggy on older hardware (something to do with the underlying python, I believe) and KDE is a tricky desktop; as minimal install it can be very light but it offers many ways to add eye candy which can drive needed resources up and stress especially the graphics of older hardware. Have a look at desktop settings like animations, shadows, transparencies etc and try reducing startup apps, panel items and open browser windows too.
Should your mbp have an nvidia card running the open source nouveaux drivers this may well be the underlying issue here.
To provide more info of your system please post the output of: inxi -Fazy
To analyze the crash try starting onboard by typing in a terminal: onboard
then try to replicate the error and post the terminal output here or on Bugs : Onboard .
Hmm. I decided to start all over, this time with the KDE minimal install. A few things I noted:
During install I chose and tested the keyboard as “Apple laptop”, Norwegian Macintosh Layout.
After install is completed and I have done sudo pacman -Syyu or Pamac (GUI) > Settings > Refresh Databases (yes, I tried both), there are 2 places to check keyboard settings: System Settings > Keyboard, where it says my keyboard hardware keyboard model is “Generic 104-key PC”, and through Manjaro Settings Manager > Keyboard settings where it says my keyboard is “Generic 105-key PC default model” with language settings "English (US) Default).
None of these can possibly be correct as I actually have a 79-key Mac keyboard set to Norwegian layout (æ, ø, å are all in the right place). Oh well.
09:57:33.528 WARNING Onboard.XInput: Failed to create osk.Devices: not an X display
09:57:33.529 WARNING TouchInput: XInput event source failed to initialize, falling back to GTK.
09:57:33.529 WARNING Onboard.Keyboard: XInput click simulator CSFloatingSlave unavailable, falling back to CSB
uttonMapper.
09:57:33.565 WARNING TouchInput: XInput event source failed to initialize, falling back to GTK.
(onboard:3030): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 09:57:33.566: gtk_widget_get_scale_factor: assertion 'GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)'
failed
09:57:34.172 WARNING TouchInput: XInput event source failed to initialize, falling back to GTK.
09:57:34.172 WARNING Onboard.Keyboard: XInput click simulator CSFloatingSlave unavailable, falling back to CSB
uttonMapper.
zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped) onboard
This seems to work like Ctrl-F12 would on my other PC, opening a new terminal (black screen with blinking cursor top left). Ctrl-F1 brings me back to graphical session.
That’s the first thing I’d try since it’s the ‘old’ way (and it works for me). It’s an Intel graphic, shouldn’t give any problems. Everything looks healthy, 8 GB ram is ok.
To set different keyboard mappings (following https://medium.com/@philpl/arch-linux-running-on-my-macbook-2ea525ebefe3 .)
List the available ones with: ls /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/mac/all
and set the one you like with: loadkeys no
If there isn’t a Norwegian keymap search the net for ‘apple mac keymap NO Norwegian Bokmål Norway’, download the file ( eg Norwegian - Keyboard Layout Info ), put it in the /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/mac/all directory and try to load it.
Alternatively, if you have a Win machine around, install Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and follow this thread https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1418198 to create your own file.
Running X11 also fixed the shortcut for Guake - I like using Ctrl-Space instead of the default F12, and now it works regardless of which application is active.
After all this, System Settings > Keyboard Model still shows “Generic 104-key PC”, while Manjaro Settings Manager > Keyboard Settings > Keyboard Model says “Generic 104-key PC Norwegian (Macintosh)”
EDIT: Seems to be close enough for the physical keyboard, that mostly does what it says on them, but I cannot reliably get accents, etc, from Onboard.
Edit 2: When using Onboard I get � instead of the special characters expected. Running from terminal, trying to type the accent only on the key to the left of Backspace (click AltGr then ´) produces ^[´ as output.
Yes, but see my previous post, last edit. It is those symbols I can not find (which is why I am not shortening “can not”, “I am” etc - can not find the apostrophe )
Onboard’s default keyboard is the ‘compact’ layout. Open the onboard-settings app or in onboard window right-click bottom right and pick ‘preferences’.
In the settings window pick ‘Layout’ on the left and ‘full keyboard’ on the right to see all options.
Yeah, did that already as a first after installing Onboard. I still don´t understand how AltGr is supposed to work in onboard, but I’ll check the documentation some other time. Works good enough for now, and as a bonus at some point in this quest the `' key on the physical keyboard started behaving as expected again.
but I’m on XFCE minimal and I keep things as simple as possible. Anyway, yes, onboard can be a little laggy on older hardware (something to do with the underlying python, I believe) and KDE is a tricky desktop; as minimal install it can be very light but it offers many ways to add eye candy which can drive needed resources up and stress especially the graphics of older hardware. Have a look at desktop settings like animations, shadows, transparencies etc and try reducing startup apps, panel items and open browser windows too.
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