I changed my Raspberry Pi default keyboard settings. How can I reset this change?

Question

I changed my Raspberry Pi keyboard (using command the sudo nano /etc/default/keyboardp). I set:

XKBLAYOUT = 'in'

Now, after reboot I just can't login! Can I somehow reset this CHANGE?

Answer 1

If you know the IP address you can ssh from another machine. Then use the raspi-config utility:

Open a terminal

1. Run raspi-config
2. Choose Localisation Options
3. Choose Change Keyboard Layout
4. Choose your keyboard or one of the generics
5. Choose your langauge. For instance, for American English choose English (US)
6. sudo reboot

Alternatively to ssh, if you have proper partitions on your SD card you can:

1. Insert it into your laptop
2. Change keyboard setting with vim /Volumes/<card name>/etc/default/keyboard to XKBLAYOUT="in" to XKBLAYOUT="us" or whatever suits your need

Answer 2

Can you insert the SD card into another machine and mount the filesystem?

If so, edit /etc/default/keyboard and change XKBLAYOUT="in" back to your desired setting.

If needed, there's a list of valid codes on Wikipedia.

Answer 3

You have switched to an Indic keyboard, though it's hard to know which one. They look quite different depending on which one was selected. There are some examples here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard_layouts#Indic

You basically have two choices: use another machine to ssh into you pi and fix it, or reflash your pi and start over.