Man page 8 : install-keymap

install-keymap expand a given keymap and install it as boot-time keymap

install-keymap [keymap-name | NONE | KERNEL]

install-keymap usually takes a keymap-name as argument. The file is passed to loadkeys for loading, so that valid values for this argument are the same than that of arguments to loadkeys. install-keymap expands include-like statements in that file, and puts the result in /etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz, which will be loaded into the kernel at boot-time.

One may also specify KERNEL instead of a keymap name, causing /etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz to be removed, making sure that no custom keymap will replace the kernel's builtin keymap at next reboot.

An argument of NONE tells the command to do nothing. It can be used by caller scripts to avoid handling this special case and needlessly duplicate code.

The purpose of this processing is to solve an annoying problem, of 2 apparently conflicting issues. The first one is an important goal of keymap management in Debian, namely ensuring that whenever the user or admin is expected to use the keyboard, the keymap selected as boot-time keymap is in use; this means the keymap has to be loaded before a shell is ever proposed, which means very early in the booting process, and especially before all local filesystems are mounted (/etc/rcS.d/S10checkroot.sh can spawn sulogin).

The second issue is that for flexibility we allow that /usr or /usr/share may live on their own partition(s), and thus /usr/share/keymaps, where keymap files live, may not be available for reading at the time we need a keymap file. And no, we won't put 1Mb of keymaps in the root partition just for this.

And the problem is, most keymap files are not self-contained, so it does not help to just copy the selected file into the root partition. The best known solution so far is to expand the keymap file so that it becomes self-contained, and put it in the root partition. That's what this tool does.

/etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz 10

Where the boot-time keymap is stored

loadkeys (8).

This program and manual page were written by Yann Dirson for the Debian GNU/Linux system, but as it should not include any Debian-specific code, it may be used by others.