I've got EasyPeasy 1.1 running on my Asus 1000H EEE netbook, and I want the keymap it uses for everyday purposes to reflect the keymap used by Windows XP. It's not as simple as one might think -- the standard advice, I'm sure, will be to go to Preferences >> Keyboard >> Language >> English and then select one of the options there. There's even one (I forget its name) which purports to be "Formerly US-Int'l". The problem is, I *USE* US-Int'l on my XP partition for everyday stuff, and the two keymaps do NOT match up.

For example, when I strike the apostrophe key in XP, unless the next letter is a vowel or the letter 'c', nothing happens and it's as though I intended to insert a full apostrophe. In EP, however, when using the keymap setting that is nominally US-Int'l, apostrophe + [any letter] results in an accent aigüe being added to ALL letters, including s, m, c (instead of the cedille ç I get using the XP), etc. Worse, the only way I can find to modify things is to go directly into the kmap.txt file (or whatever it is - I can't remember right now, and it's been weeks since I wrestled with it) and edit that thing by hand.

Unfortunately, despite doing lots of reading on the topic, I don't understand the idea of sticky keys, multiple layers of keystrokes, etc. well enough to add/modify the right lines of code. (Back when I was fighting with this 4 hours a day I tried, and I failed abysmally. None of the changes I thought I had made actually stuck.) A GUI keymap editor would be nice, but I've not been able to find one for Linux. If I could find one, that'd be the ideal -- in order to properly transliterate Arabic, I'd like to add some characters to my keyboard's repertoire that don't currently exist [such as vowels with macrons (Ā), s with a caron (š), and various consonants with dots below (I can't find a good example in the character map XP is offering me, but picture a d or t like this O, but without the circumflex on top Ộ ) -- but in the absence of that, I'd settle for being able to just use my preferred keymap from XP when using my Linux install.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks a bunch!

What kind of keyboard do you have ?
And which keyboard layout is used by XP

The 'model' keyboard I am using according to the EP Preferences menu is "Generic 105-key (intl) PC".

The English-language layout used in EP is "USA International (AltGr dead keys)" and the Arabic-language layout is just plain "Arabic." It resembles the Arabic-101 layout pretty closely, except the B key appears to produce no glyphs at all, and the G and T keys don't produce the glyphs they should when pressed in combination with SHIFT.

The English-language layout used in XP is "USA International," and the Arabic-language layout is "Arabic 101."