keyboard and language questions

[bigspark]

I have been having some trouble changing keyboard layouts, languages and locales, and things that should work for normal debian are not working. 

Can anyone throw down the proper commands for this? 

-change to german/french/spanish keyboard

-change charset leafpage saves in

-change language of os menu

-change languge of console

I have seen some wierd things can someone throw down some knowledge for me? 

tia

[paxmark1]

Command line options should be pretty standard, try the Debian Wiki.

guI's will vary with the DE.  What is you DE ()Desktop Envioronment)

As always are you Sparky 6 - rolling               
or                           Sparky 5 - stable.

If you are brand new and do not have a brand new computer, Sparky 5 would be the place to learn things. 

Posting the output of "inxi -br"  never hurts.  No screenshots please, Ctl-Shift-c to copy from the terminal.  Use the # button to mark up as code.

[bigspark]

Sparky 4, lxce

The main thing I need is changing keyboard from english to other languages for special characters. 

I tried the standard debian ones and got some errors, could do everything but what I am trying to do. 

It is also not exactly obvious what all of the fr_38907 charsets are in the console tool, and what exactly is supposed to be changing what.  Like what is the terminology if I just want the keyboard to match a different language with that languages characters? 

[paxmark1]

Via Debian Wiki
https://wiki.debian.org/LXDE#XDM
see section 4. Keyboard layout switching

98% of your binaries are from Old-Stable Debian
LXDE 9     https://packages.debian.org/stretch/lxde
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianOldStable
You can go to the stable version (Sparky 5 in this case) and get two years newer programs that will see very few changes or stay with old-stable till jul 2021 when security updates cease.   You would have LXDE 10.  change log follows.  It became stable a few months before the hard freeze and got into Stable.  - Sparky 5

lxde-metapackages (10) unstable; urgency=medium
  * Replacing recommendation for gksu with policykit-1 (use pkexec instead)
    (Closes: #885550).
  * Replacing http with https in debian/copyright file.
  * Adding mousepad as an alternative to leafpad dependency (Closes: #864164).
  * Lowercasing the short descriptions of packages (Closes: #873529).
  * Bump debhelper compat version to 10.
  * Bump Standards-Version to 4.1.4.

-- Andriy Grytsenko <andrej@rep.kiev.ua>  Sun, 15 Apr 2018 22:58:33 +0300

I do not know that going from LXDE 9 to 10 will fix your problems.  I only type in one language - character set

But even better LXDE appears to support many languages fairly well.   see  below DE ES along with FR on their wiki.  Possibly also several languages of irc for LXDE
https://wiki.lxde.org/fr/Accueil

Several forums in languages other than EN
https://forum.lxde.org/#

Best wishes.

[bigspark]

I hope you can understand why I am disappointed with this answer.

https://benohead.com/debian-change-the-keyboard-layout-from-the-console/
https://archive.is/5SS4l

None of this stuff works.  The etc/defaul/keybaord file now says de but I can't make it take effect. 

All suggestions in these articles fail and setupcon cannot be run in the console because 'not in console'

This is the easiest thing that has been native to linux for a long time now, why doesn't it work without having to upgrade my entire system and dm?   

Do I understand that there is no keyboard switcher launcher for the version of lxde i'm on?  Or any outright application I could install? 

[paxmark1]

Could anyone else please give input if they use LXDE and use more than one keyboard layout.   I do not use LXDE and only use english.

As a user of LXQT I wish to never speak against the parent of it, LXDE.  I can say that when comparing LXDE and LXQT the load on the processor is similar as are memory requirements.  LXQT does have a GUI for setting the keyboard.  I have never used it. 

Another alternative would be for OP to post  on the one of the several LXDE forums or LXDE irc. 

Looking at https://wiki.lxde.org/en/Change_keyboard_layouts

I doubt that the OP wishes to use "setxkbmap"  If anyone knows the GUI for LXDE 9 please post.