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I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T420 with a Brazilian ABNT keyboard layout. This is a rather unique layout where the slash is between the context menu key and the arrow keys.

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However, the slash key does not work! How could I make it work?

1
  • You sir get the weirdest thinkpad keyboard layout award. I'm really not sure what advantage this keyboard layout has really. I would prefer to give up my Context key over my control but I guess the thinkpad creators thought otherwise. Shrug oh well. It is shame ABNT is interpreted this way on Thinkpad computers.
    – William
    Aug 20, 2018 at 2:16

4 Answers 4

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You can change the system-wide keyboard configuration (including TTY), by running:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

as described in this SO answer.

To choose the thinkpadz60 layout shown in @brandizzi's answer, select the "IBM ThinkPad Z60m/Z60t/Z61m/Z61t" layout in the list. It should be above the "Generic PC" layout:

EDIT: Also works on Debian

4

I solved it (in part) by adding the following line in /etc/default/keyboard:

XKBMODEL="thinkpadz60"

Actually, I replaced the line XKBMODEL="" with XKBMODEL="thinkpadz60". Then, I restarted the notebook. (Actually, I believe one would have just to restart X by running restart lightd or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace. I suspect that it is even possible to reload this X configuration without restarting it but I have not found how to do it yet.)

Unfortunately, the key still does not work at the text terminals. However, since I use (most of the time) the GNOME Terminal instead of the pure text ones, it is a minor nuisance because it works in the terminal emulator.

(If you do not get it working yet, you can also type slash by pressing AltGr+Q and question mark by typing AltGr+W)

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I have the same Lenovo notebook with the BR ABNT keyboard. I was able to fix the slash key for text terminals.

  1. Go to /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty.

  2. Copy the original map br-abnt2.map.gz to a temp directory.

  3. Decompress the file and rename it to br-thinkpad.map (example, you can use any name you like).

  4. Edit the file br-thinkpad.map with a text editor.

  5. Insert the following line:

    keycode  97 = slash question degree
    

    I inserted the line respecting the order of the other keycodes in the file.

  6. Save the file.

  7. Compress the file with gzip br-thinkpad.map.

  8. Copy the compressed file to /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty.

  9. Test the file with the command loadkeys br-thinkpad.

  10. To make the change permanent edit /etc/sysconfig/keyboard, changing the value of KEYTABLE to br-thinkpad.map.gz.

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  • Works well for me. tks
    – albert
    Apr 7, 2022 at 1:30
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I recently update to Ubuntu 22.04 and the keyboard stop working... The problem was that Gnome back to work on Wayland. I restart the screen session with Gnome on XOrg and the slash "/" key back to work.

Just for improve the information above ;)

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