In order to produce Umlaute on a keyboard with english layout, copy the file Xmodmap.Umlaut into your home directory and activate it:cp /vol/tmp/Xmodmap.Umlaut ~/ Normally the activation has to be repeated every time you log in; to avoid this, simply add the second line from above to your ~/.profile to have it executed automatically. With this key mapping, you can produce ä, ö, ü and ß by pressing Alt-Gr+{a,o,u,s} or Shift-Alt-Gr+{a,o,u,s} for the respective capital letters.
xmodmap ~/Xmodmap.Umlaut
You can specify the layout of the keyboard by typing: setxkbmap layout (where layout may be us, de, ru, etc. ..)
Before logging in, the language can be set, after typing the loginname and by clicking Language underneath the login prompt and selecting the desired entry.
We changed the encoding from ISO-8859-15 to UTF-8, since this will be the future standard, and is better suited for a multi-alphabetical and multi-lingual environment like ours (russian, chinese, japanese, french, german). Naturally, such changes lead to problems. So, here are some advice:
Many files are encoded in ISO-8859-1(5) , which can lead to problems when printing them. If a document or email stops printing after an Umlaut, or if Umlaute are not printed at all, it is most likely due to a problem with the encoding. A program called 'recode' will put things right: recode ISO-8859-15..UTF-8 example.txt Please backup the file example.txt, since it will be re-encoded and the old version is lost. You can check how a terminal recognizes the encoding of example.txt by typing:
file -i example.txt