Bug 2278866

Summary: Please support org.freedesktop.locale1 keyboard configuration for Anaconda on Live environment
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Jiri Konecny <jkonecny>
Component: mate-desktopAssignee: Wolfgang Ulbrich <raveit65.sun>
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 42CC: raveit65.sun, redhat-bugzilla
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OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2025-03-28 15:16:56 UTC Type: ---
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Description Jiri Konecny 2024-05-03 12:01:13 UTC
This is a message for the Mate+Compiz spin:

Hello, I’m contacting you on behalf of the Anaconda team to raise awareness that Anaconda has to change the backend which is used to control keyboard configuration of the Live environment. That means that we will depend on the org.freedesktop.locale1 D-Bus API and we are contacting you with a request to support this API. Currently, Anaconda depends on libXklavier library, however, we are forced to migrated from this solution to Wayland compatible solution for various reasons:

* The libXklavier library is deprecated (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1955025 )
* Anaconda have to migrate to Wayland native solution which makes libXklavier to crash
* The libXklavier doesn’t work great in some situations on Wayland environment
  * Anaconda was forced to not be able to configure keyboards which makes user experience worse https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2072941 

Also, the Anaconda team got a lot smaller, so we are not in position to maintain both solutions based on the system. That would get us into more bugs in the future which we don’t have capacity to resolve. For that reason we are requesting all the SIGs owning spins on Fedora to implement support which will reflect this DBus API to the Live environment. More precisely, this API will be used by Anaconda to read and change the currently set keyboard layout configuration on Live media. Your Live environment should reflect on these changes and apply them to the running Live environment. I’ll create a system wide change soon to connect all the parties in one place but we wanted to reach all of you beforehand.

What you need to do:
* Verify if you are already reflecting the systemd-localed keyboard configuration on your spin Live installation environment.
* If the above is not correct, please implement this missing communication. For inspiration (can’t be used in this version) feel free to take a look at the Sway solution (https://github.com/alebastr/sway-systemd/blob/main/src/locale1-xkb-config ).

For more information please see this https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/org.freedesktop.locale1.html 

We would like to get these changes together with Wayland to switch to Fedora 41 if possible. In case you won’t be able to add support for the DBus service, we will solve this situation with the same approach as described in bug above which means that Anaconda won’t be controlling your system keyboard configuration in the Live environment and users will be requested to set this in the Anaconda for the installed system only.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and we will try to help you with this migration process.

A note:
All the X11 spins might share the same solution.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1 Wolfgang Ulbrich 2024-05-03 12:12:36 UTC
I have no idea what i should do.

> We would like to get these changes together with Wayland to switch to Fedora 41 if possible. In case you won’t be able to add support for the DBus service, we will solve this situation with the same approach as described in bug above which means that Anaconda won’t be controlling your system keyboard configuration in the Live environment and users will be requested to set this in the Anaconda for the installed system only.

I am fine with this solution.

Comment 2 Jiri Konecny 2024-05-30 13:33:24 UTC
Thank you for your reply.

If you have time and want to start with the X11 solution for keyboard switching. I would recommend to announce it (fedora-devel or somewhere) and create a project for X11 variant. It might be a systemd service or something like that based on the Sway solution linked in the description.

Not saying you have to do it, just if you want to start actively working on this it would be great.

Comment 3 Wolfgang Ulbrich 2024-06-05 09:06:39 UTC
Sorry, i do not have the skills to write a python/C program or what ever do you expect from me.

Comment 4 Aoife Moloney 2025-02-26 13:01:59 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora Linux 42 development cycle.
Changing version to 42.

Comment 5 Jiri Konecny 2025-03-28 15:16:56 UTC
This was implemented by 
https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/6296