Keyboard layout changes when I unplug and re-plug external keyboard

Question

I have a notebook with an external keyboard. I want to use "German (no dead keys)" on both keyboards, but for the external, it keeps resetting if I unplug it. Actually, it does not really reset - the change is not shown in Settings -> Keyboard - but the accent keys are dead.

Strangely, I can fix that by changing the type between "Generic keyboard with 101 keys" and "Generic keyboard with 105 keys". It does not matter which one I choose, but the change triggers the keyboard layout to be applied again.

For the internal keyboard the correct layout is always applied.

I'm on XUbuntu 13.04, XFCE 4.10.

Answer 1

The problem seems to be that system-wide settings are not saved. In combination with the keyboard layout being reset to the system-wide setting when it is re-plugged, that reset my layout every time. So what helped me was a simple

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

which allowed me to set the system-wide keyboard layout. The UI Xubuntu provides did not help there for some reason.