Keyboard configuration doesn't work via SSH?

Question

In January I wrote myself a reminder blog entry for configuring keyboard to German.

Doing the same thing again today on the latest Raspbian image (2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img) after a sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade and sudo reboot gives

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported; falling back to defaults
update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported; falling back to defaults

The tool does not start after that output. Those warnings is all I get.

I am doing this via ssh, not from a local terminal.

My version is

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 4.4.13-v7+ #894 SMP Mon Jun 13 13:13:27 BST 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie)"
NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="8"
VERSION="8 (jessie)"
ID=raspbian
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianForums"
BUG_REPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianBugs"

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Raspbian
Description:    Raspbian GNU/Linux 8.0 (jessie)
Release:        8.0
Codename:       jessie

Is keyboard configuration broken?

I have tried:

• Doing the same on Pi 1B before updating and upgrading results in the same issue.
• Configuring the keyboard with sudo raspi-config, then choosing 5) Internationalisation Options and I3) Change Keyboard Layout. This seems to start above program, at least I see warnings for a short time, then raspi-config restarts at the main menu.

• sudo apt-get dist-upgrade gave 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. After that, the situation is still the same

  pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
  Reading package lists... Done
  Building dependency tree
  Reading state information... Done
  Calculating upgrade... Done
  0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
  pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo raspi-config
  update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported; falling back to defaults
  update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported; falling back to defaults
  Reloading keymap. This may take a short while
  

• setxkbmap does not work on SSH (needs X-Window?)

  pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo setxkbmap de
  Cannot open display "default display"
  

• I can edit the file /etc/default/keyboard but the main reason I wanted to run the keyboard configuration utility is to find out what exactly I have to put there. My final goal is to white a shell script that automatically does this for me.

• I have cross-checked my download. The checksum is fine:

  

  The checksums of the extracted IMG are

    File: 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img
  CRC-32: 7d4edc37
     MD4: 15f4830e1043277a7cd0ae42caa77d58
     MD5: 0d50922374043ed5246df2b316eb7d25
   SHA-1: 51d5e457ead8278c2626f4a544b4d046846a08df
  

Answer 1

You can't run it via SSH. This has been reported on Github for raspi-config and was closed because

If you were running it through ssh, that's the expected behaviour. As you saw, all raspi-config does here is call dpkg-reconfigure, which comes from Debian and is not modified by us.

To configure the keyboard via SSH, edit the settings in /etc/default/keyboard which are loaded during system start. The kernel discovers the keyboard udev get identifies the keyboard and sets it up.

Check the files

1. /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/64-xorg-xkb.rules
2. sudo vi /etc/default/keyboard
    XKBLAYOUT="set your layout like gb|us"

Answer 2

On my Raspberry Pi 3 with RaspiOS 2020-05-27 Buster (based on Debian 10.4) the problem exists if I run raspi-config into a ssh shell and without a phisical keyboard attached. If an USB keyboard is attached, the dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration command (or the relative raspi-config option) does indeed work, even if invoked into an ssh session.