Since I installed Solaris, I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with my keyboard pretending to be American (mostly with ” and @ being mixed up). Today, I needed to write a post which included a lot of UK currency symbols (£ – pounds sterling) and rather than switching to a Windows PC, I spent a considerable amount of my weekend researching the solution.

It seems that setting a UK keyboard within the Java Desktop System doesn’t make a blind bit of difference, and the answer is to use the kdmconfig utility. After running this and switching the Window system server from Xorg to Xsun (I haven’t a clue what the difference is), I was able to define my keyboard type (Generic UK-English) as well as selecting the correct display and pointing device settings. After restarting the graphical interface (logoff/logon), I was back in action with all the keys in the right place.

Incidentally, there is another setting which, although not related to the keyboard layout, will affect the display language – at logon, ensure that the language option is set to en_GB.ISO8559-15 – Great Britain (Euro) for an English language interface with European currency symbol (€€) support.