Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

use `/etc/vconsole.conf` to set XKB settings

Open
  • Is something wrong?
#4,778 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Maintainers usually reply within 1 day

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
62/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
linux, python
Domain
operating-systems

Research direction

Start by tracing how archinstall currently forks localectl for keymap setup and compare that with systemd-localed's /etc/vconsole.conf keys: XKBLAYOUT, XKBMODEL, XKBVARIANT, and XKBOPTIONS. Check how Wayland environments receive XKB_DEFAULT_* values through /etc/environment; done means X11 and Wayland window managers receive the configured keyboard settings without the localectl fork.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Since systemd v253 systemd-localed reads:

XKBLAYOUT=
XKBMODEL=
XKBVARIANT=
XKBOPTIONS=

Which would allow for keymap setup to work OOTB for certain X11 WMs. And is cleaner than forking a localectl

Wayland WMs usually respect XKB_DEFAULT_* env vars similarly, usually through /etc/environment

Dominant language
Python
Stars
8.5k
Forks
774
Avg merge
3d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
30

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from archlinux/archinstall

All issues in archlinux/archinstall

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.