Dealing with messed up consoles
For various reasons, it's possible that, during a rescue operation, you end up on a virtual console that has a keymap set differently than what you might expect.
For excellent and logical historical reasons, different countries have different keyboard layouts and while that's usually not a problem on daily operations using SSH, when you hit a serial console, the remote configuration actually takes effect.
This will manifest itself as you failing to enter the root password on a console, for example. This is especially present on some hosts configured with a German keyboard layout (QWERTZ), or inversely, if you're used to such a keyboard (or the french AZERTY layout), most hosts configured with the english QWERTY layout.
A few tips, for QWERTY users landing on a QWERTZ layout:
-
Y and Z are reversed, otherwise most letters are in the same place
-
- (dash) is left of the right shift key, i.e. in place of / (slash)
-
/ (slash) is above 7 (so shift-seven)
Resetting a system to a US keyboard
Most systems should generally have a US layout, but if you find a system with a German keyboard layout, you can reset it with the following procedure:
dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
setupcon -k -fSee also the Debian wiki Keyboard page.