I think the problem is more general. On a system with multiple input layouts
(such as dvorak and us) all users need to login using the same keyboard layout,
since it is not possible to change keyboard layout on the login screen itself.

It would be great if there would be a possibility to change the keyboard layout
on the login screen (as you have in windows btw).

If you can change keyboard layout by running a command, you might be able to use
the keyboard gesture listener to change the keyboard layout.  

I'm not sure what the best way to support this feature would be.  Are you
suggesting adding menu choices to gdmlogin and a button to gdmgreeter?  I'm not
familiar with how to change keyboard layouts so if someone could provide me with
the code that does the changing, I could integrate it into GDM.  Though we
probably need to get someone from gnome usability to decide how to best
integrate such a feature into the UI.

Ability to change the keyboard layout on the login screen (as you have in
Windows 2000/XP) is really needed for some countries. For example in Lithuania
majority of users use lt "Baltic" layout (in this layout lithuanian letters are
on the numeric row instead of numbers and !@#$%^&* symbols), so if user uses
symbols like !@#$%^& in his password he must change layout to "us" (if user uses
numbers in his password, that he could input in these in small keyboard area for
number entering, but with these option also there are usability problems,
because gdm doesn't turn on numlock as default :( )

Shouldn't status of this bug to be NEW instead of UNCONFIRMED ?

*** Bug 63263 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Mantas, I'm confused by your comment.  You should be able to set up your default Xserver configuration so that your keyboard layout works at the login screen
(and in your session).  It sounds like you have setup your Xserver with a "US" keyboard layout but perhaps are using the GNOME keyboard switcher to support your keyboard in your GNOME session.  This isn't really the right way to setup your keyboard.  Making your keyboard the default Xserver keyboard is the right way if you want your keyboard to work for login.

Having the ability to switch keyboard layout should only really be needed for situations where a user wants to use multiple keyboard layouts with the same keyboard (perhaps like when a computer is used in a kiosk environment), or when a computer is shared among users who have different keyboard layout preferences.

If we do support switching keyboard layouts in GDM, there should be some mechanism so the user can tell what keyboard layout is selected to avoid confusion.

*** Bug 377020 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I think my case is not uncommon: I prefer Dvorak but other people who might sometimes use my machine need Qwerty.

In OS X, if this feature is enabled, you get a popup menu that shows the currently active layout.  The menu contains some recently used layouts (us english, dvorak), and a list of all layouts available on the system.  I think this works well.

The gnome keyboard capplet seems to have the relevant code.

I would not be opposed to adding a patch to GDM that allows keyboard switching, as long as the feature could be configurable so that distros could turn on or off the feature if desired.

Note that GDM supports "Custom Configuration Commands" starting with GDM 2.17, so you might be able to use this feature to launch a command that would change the keyboard layout.

Refer to similar bugs #435525 and #396162, which are also requesting additional functionality on the login screen.

I'm not sure this is high priority.  While I understand that some users may prefer Qwerty versus Dvorak, you don't really have to suffer long to type your way through the login screen, and when your session starts it can be configured to use the keyboard style you prefer.

I don't think this feature is really needed to support specific-language keyboards.  Since a computer typically only has a single keyboard, it should be possible to configure the Xserver to work with the language keyboard that is being used.  This feature would be a nice-to-have to allow someone who wants to type Dvorak style instead of Qwerty, or somesuch.

There might be some other situations, like if the username or password has language specific characters in it.  So some users might need to switch to another language to easily enter those characters.   I could imagine this happening on a network where users log into different machines and some have different keyboards.  But again, this would be an odd use-case with an easy workaround (simply don't use such characters in usernames or passwords if you sometimes need to use keyboards that don't support them).

Though, again, I'd accept a patch to allow keyboard switching in GDM if anybody thinks this is important enough to code.

it could be useful to have this in a multi seat setup with different types of keyboards as well or simply if the keyboard is changed before login in and maybe other situations. Just thoughts for the moment.

From the Ubuntu bugtracker (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/138366):

I chose Dvorak as my keyboard layout during installation. Now I can use Dvorak everywhere including the login screen. I really like it.

Now, if multiple users want to use my laptop (this hasn't occurred to me yet), shouldn't they be able to type their passwords using their own keyboard layouts?

How about letting the user click on his/her username (just like Fedora 7's login screen [1]) and loading each person's keyboard layout settings automatically?

[1] http://www.tuxmachines.org/gallery/d/26870-2/fedora-gdm-2.png

It would be nice if GDM could easily work with multiple keyboard layouts, though it seems difficult for GDM to guess what the keyboard layout might be.

The idea of starting to use the user's preference keyboard after user selection is a novel idea, but it seems that it could lead to very confusing behavior to users who might not be expecting GDM to work this way.  Don't you think some users would find it confusing if the keyboard layout changed between username and password entry.  Remember some users like to type their username and don't use the face browser to select their username.  What if on a multi-user system, some users wanted this behavior and other's did not?

It might be better if GDM had a simple interface that allowed users to select their keyboard layout, so GDM could use this layout for this username/password entry.

How about placing something like the following under the password box:

    Your Keyboard Layout: [ Dvorak |▽|]

And the default is set to user's preference. Would this work?

If someone wanted to provide a patch to add the ability to switch keyboard layouts to GDM, I'd be happy to add the patch upstream if it were well written.  It should be configurable to turn off such a feature.  

I must say I don't really like the idea of the keyboard layout changing between username and password entry.  It seems to make more sense to just allow the user to change to common layout configurations if the user wants.

this would be very needed in a case of a machine without an xorg.conf file (this file *must* die) with Xorg 7.2 and later

I also would really like this functionality.  I work in a lab where all machines have NFS-mounted homedirs, so we can log in from any terminal and see the same environment.  It would be nice if clicking on each username in the user chooser resulted in the keyboard setting being changed to whatever it was last time the user successfully logged in.  (My password is quite long and I have to hunt-and-peck on a qwerty keyboard, as I am also a Dvorak user...)

See gnome-screensaver for an example of how to display the current user's keyboard layout, and how to switch layouts.  When you lock the screen, gnome-screensaver shows the keyboard layout next to the password box.

On a separate issue: why is gnome-screensaver's screen lock functionality not integrated with gdm?  It seems like keyboard layout setting is not the only duplication of functionality.

Note that you can use BackgroundProgram to run a screensaver with GDM.

I anticipate that with the new GDM rewrite that there will be more opportunities to integrate gnome-screensaver and GDM closer together since they now, for example, share ConsoleKit.

The new rewrite makes it easier to integrate programs into GDM.  Note the gnome-power-manager is already integrated.  So this is do-able.  The hard part about integrating additional programs into GDM is that you need to make sure that these any program doesn't expose any functionality that isn't appropriate at login time before authentication.

actually, I'm not even sure distros like ubuntu 8.04 will still provide xorg.conf, so, if that is the case, this would need to be looked into pretty soon!

Thanks to Matthias, this is fixed in trunk and will be released in 2.24.

Still not there in Gnome 3.24..
What's happening?