Description of problem: After some update about a half of year ago, I ceased being able to log into system! All these months long I was using some tricks to log in (like booting in rescue mode), till I finally found a solution. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kbd-misc-1.15.5-9.fc19.noarch How reproducible: easily Steps to Reproduce: 1. loadkeys ru 2. type something Actual results: It types russian if unicode_start was done, otherwise it types squares. Expected results: Should still type english till I explicitly switch layout. Additional info: The problem appears to be that ru.map.gz have recently appeared in /lib/kbd/keymaps/xkb. Previously it was only in /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty, and it was working very well. Now there are 2 different ru.map.gz, and loadkeys takes the one from keymaps/xkb, and that one is broken. Also dracut takes it into an initramfs, and you get an unloggable system. The solution is to remove /lib/kbd/keymaps/xkb/* and regenerate initramfs. Now I finally can login without a rescue mode...
The original keymap (/usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/ru.map.gz) is still available in kbd-legacy package (/lib/kbd/keymaps/legacy/i386/qwerty/ru.map.gz). kbd-legacy is required by kbd, so it has to be installed on the system. The new keymap is automatically converted from XKB layout, see [1] for more information. Unfortunately, for some keymaps the resulting new keymap is not suitable and ru.map.gz is one of them, see [2]. Should work fine in F20 and newer. I won't fix that in F19 because it's not a trivial change, F19 is going to be at EOL soon and the issue can pretty easily workarounded (just replace generated kaymap with the original). Sorry for inconvenience. [1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-May/183099.html [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1031848
(In reply to Vitezslav Crhonek from comment #1) > be at EOL soon and the issue can pretty easily workarounded (just replace > generated kaymap with the original). No because dracut took it into initramfs, where replacing it is not so easy (need to re-generate initramfs). Also, to replace it you need to log in while you can't. So the work-around is not trivial, I'd say it is impossible for most users (eg you need a skills to boot from another media and access your FS, regenerate initramfs etc).