[gentoo-user] Installation: help me set up my keyboard, please.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Gentoo,

I'm having a great time installing Gentoo, and everything's going
swimmingly, including having compiled a kernel, got networking working, I
can use a USB stick, .....

Except I've hit a brick wall.  I want to set up my console keyboard, so I
go to edit /etc/conf.d/keymaps, as described in the "x86 Handbook".

That file says, after a temporary previous edit:

#########################################################################
# Use KEYMAP to specify the default console keymap.  There is a complete tree
# of keymaps in /usr/share/keymaps to choose from.

KEYMAP="uk"
#########################################################################

This is aggravatingly vague.  I cannot find anything to tell me _HOW_ to
"Use KEYMAP to specify ...".  Somehow, my current setting of "uk" seems
to find and load an appropriate keymap, perhaps
/usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwerty/uk.map.gz.

So the question is how do I get the system to load up my own special
keymap, currently called boottime.keymap.gz on my Debian system?  Where
must I write this file so that it gets loaded?  Where do I find the
documentation telling where to write this file?

I've delved into /etc/init.d/keymaps (a "runscript" shell), but it
appears merely to use ${KEYMAP}.  I cannot see how this script manages to
find a filename out of "uk".  Presumably the interpreter /sbin/runscript
runs the find command, somehow.  But I can't find any documentation for
runscript.

So I'm stymied.  It's a real jar after so much of the installation has
gone so smoothly, with otherwise excellent documentation, well above
average for a Linux distro.

How do I set my keyboard layout?

Thanks in advance for the help!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
-- 
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