Setting UK keyboards in Vagrant Ubuntu Machines, using Ansible

Wow, now there’s a specific post title…

I use Ansible… quite a bit :) and one of the things I do with Ansible is to have a standard build desktop that I can create using Vagrant. Recently I upgraded the base to Ubuntu 18.04, and it annoyed me that I still didn’t have a working keyboard combination, so I kept getting US keyboards. I spent 20 minutes sorting it out, and here’s how to do it.

- name: Set keyboard layout
  debconf:
    name: "keyboard-configuration"
    question: "keyboard-configuration/{{ item.key }}"
    value: "{{ item.value }}"
    vtype: "{{ item.type|default('string') }}"
  with_items:
  - { key: "altgr", value: "The default for the keyboard layout", vtype: "select" }
  - { key: "compose", value: "No compose key", vtype: "select" }
  - { key: "ctrl_alt_bksp", value: "false", type: "boolean" }
  - { key: "variant", value: "English (UK)", vtype: "select" }
  - { key: "layout", value: "English (UK)", vtype: "select" }
  - { key: "model", value: "Generic 105-key PC (intl.)", vtype: "select" }

I posted how I got to this point over at the Server Fault post that got me most of the way. https://serverfault.com/a/912342/14832

JonTheNiceGuy

He/Him. Husband and father. Linux advocating geek. Co-Host on the AdminAdmin Podcast, occasional conference speaker.

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