One easy way to obtain accented letters, as needed for several languages such as French, German etc., is rather simple: e.g. to obtain ë, just type the sequence
<compose-key> <"> <e>
where '<' and '>' are used to indicate a key (you don't type those). Which key is taken as the
<compose-key> depends on your keyboard settings. The default is
<AltGr> but you can change, or verify, this by changing the 'Compose key position' under 'Options' in the 'Keyboard Layout' section of the 'System Settings'.
It is worth noting that <AltGr> is called 'Right Alt' in the list of options for the <compose-key> setting.
To my dismay, this didn't work anymore after an update that also updated the kernel to version 3.2.0-58, in the 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) release.
Searching for a solution, I stumbled on this old post on the excellent askubuntu site:
Recently 12.04 introduced a bug in keyboard handling. The workaround is to use the following code in a terminal:The strange thing is that this helpful post dates from June 2012, while my problem appeared only in January 2014.setxkbmap "en","fr" where en and fr represent the keyboard layouts you use.One step further is to run this command on startup by clicking the top right cog wheel and choose startup applications.
In any case, I followed the advice.
First there was the problem of finding out what the short names for my keyboard layouts are, since, sadly, 'System settings' only gave the verbose names: 'English (US)' and
'English (US with euro on 5)'.
Luckily, a list of all available keyboard layouts can be found in the
xkeyboard-config manual which lists all available layouts.
Thus, from
man xkeyboard-config
I learned that the short names to be used by the setxkbmap command were "us" and "us(euro)", respectively. It then remained to incant
setxkbdmap to tell the system which layouts we want to use.
setxkbmap "us","us(euro)"
and things went back to normal. Perhaps, it's an old bug that, because of popular demand, has been re-introduced recently.
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