Hello,

first, I have no idea if this is the correct place for a rather technical complain/question... if not, please point me in the right direction.

My worry is that in KDE 4 you are limited to 4 keyboard layouts - I understand that this limitation stems from using setxkbmap which can only load 4 keyboard layouts and then use fast-switching between them.

This limitation is new to KDE 4 - KDE 3.5 launched a new setxkbmap command everytime you wanted your layout switched. This was slower but allowed for an unlimited number of layouts.

Some of my friends use many (as in 10 or more) keyboard layouts and KDE 4 is unusable for them because of this change. Is there a workaround? Is this something that could be changed in future versions? Does anyone have any views on this?

Many thanks,
Lada

The only workaround that would be possible at this time would be finding a different system to manage keyboard layouts. Please file a feature request at bugs.kde.org, so that the developers can be made aware of it and make changes to fix it.

Thanks for the reply. My thinking was that KDE could fail-back to the old way of switching keyboards if the user selected more than 4 layouts. Alternatively, it could use the best from both worlds and group the layouts in groups of 4 to allow fast switching between layouts within group and slower switching between groups. But this would require more changes to the UI as well.

The first mentioned method would likely be easiest to implement and would allow the best of both worlds.

A lot depends on what languages you choose; for example, the Czech keyboard layout is very similar to the German and the Polish to the English. So there are some situations where you might be able to 'make do' with one keyboard for two languages.

In fact, because I have installed KDE4 'over' KDE3, I'm still using the KDE3 keyboard module within KDE4; so I have five possible layouts.

As I had the same problem and seemingly nobody else submitted the subreport, I just did: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212374.

Maybe someone with more knowledge wants to comment there on the bug.

(edit: corrected Link ... too much bug tabs at the same time ...)

This limit is very annoying make it not worth to use KDE.
The user needs much knowledge and time to program a work around.
Therefore, is it possible to download the old version with a functioning
language switching and use it instead of the not working KDE4 in Kubuntu 10.04 or 10.10?
And is the functioning version of KDE 3.5 or which version?
Thank you.

Though there is a warning about the limit, I have not in practice encountered any problems with five layouts - which is what I also used to have under KDE3.

I saw the message also, but what did you do exactly.
How can you add another six languages?

For some reason KDE4 accepted the five layouts I inherited from KDE3 but I realise, on trying to increase the number on another user, that KDE4 will not allow this.

However, if you really need more than four layouts, you can get four more layouts by creating another user. I have a second user for business rather than personal data and, as I tend to use different languages for business than for personal use, I have a different selection of languages for each user.

The issue was solved by work-arounding the xkb limitation, and a proper fix will be in 4.6. See http://codersgrumble.blogspot.com/2010/ ... ticky.html for more information.