Keyboard text - how get basic encoding? Not US-Intl? "%20" not space. Where change after install? KUbuntu ; jor XOrg

[giovanni_re]

Sending this to the XOrg list, because of the possible involvement of
the X configurations, as noticed in some web searches.

=
KUbuntu 10.4 on ~2004 Compaq laptop, using "alternate" installer cd.  In
the USA, probably a USA build type of laptop keyboard.  This is probably
the text mode installer from the debian project, used by the Ubuntu
distro.


Is there a way, & if so what is it, to change something, on this already
installed system (ie, without having to do another complete install),
perhaps the "keyboard" type settings, to eliminate the extra characters
that are encoded into text, & the extra characters that must be typed to
get various punctuation?

=
I've been installing Linuxes for more than 10 years.  I don't know what
has changed, but recently, on the above mentioned laptop, I wasn't able,
with several different install attempts, to get just the regular simple
(ASCII?) text encoding setup.

During the install, it asks something like "Do you want to have the
keyboard detected, or select a type?".  IIRC, I tried both ways, but
couldn't figure out what to do to get the simple text coding.  

The "detect" method asks that I press several keys, like '"', etc.  "Is
there a key labled 'whatever'?" it asks, for about 10 times, often with
non-US English characters - ex, like for various European languages,
that include special accents on the visual character.

I can't recall now the options for "select the kbd style", but one i
recall was like "US-Intl" (I don't recall if that was what i chose or
not).  Maybe there was also a simple "US", but I don't think so.


==
Anyway, with the current install, I have to type '" ' - {double quote,
space} to get a single double quote character to appear.  If I press the
double quote key twice in a row, I get something like a slightly
different than normal double quote character appearing in the text -
perhaps thinner, or italicized?

And, often a "space" character, entered into a file name for file save
in firefox, will wind up like something like "%20" in the file name.


Also, note the   "&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8"   from the google search url
reference below.  -  Is that giving an indication about this situation?


==
What is a one sentence description of the essence of this keyboard
issue?

What do you suspect is the proper name for the type of keyboard layout
this laptop has?

Does the current keyboard selection method have a bug?  Any idea why
this is occurring now, & I haven't had this problem ever before?  - Ie,
was something changed recently in the Keyboard detection method?

=
So, apparently, whatever method I finally did on the setup on this
laptop (done several months ago, so I don't recall the exact steps I
took then), gave me the wrong settings.

=
So, is there a way to change some parameter somewhere in the system to
tell it the proper keyboard setting to use, so 
1) it isn't necessary to type the extra "space" to get the correct
punctuation characters, &
2) so the extraneous control characters don't show up when merely typing
a simple "space" character between words?


Thanks :)


==  References:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=linux+keyboard+type+ubuntu&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=linux+keyboard+type&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8


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