GNOME's keyboard layout is incorrect for French canadian

Does selecting Canadian French in the gnome keyboard selector work and give you a correct layout? Can you tell me what setxkbmap -print outputs?

I don't know for setxkbmap -print on a fresh install, because I would need to reinstall on a machine, but here is on my (correctly) set up machine. Yes, I actually used the gnome keyboard tool, and I was shocked to see it worked (It did not, a year ago). I had to set the number of keys to 104 (important) and then add "canadian french", and check it as a "default".

jeff@khloe:~$ setxkbmap -print
xkb_keymap {
        xkb_keycodes { include "xfree86+aliases(qwerty)" };
        xkb_types { include "complete" };
        xkb_compat { include "complete" };
        xkb_symbols { include "pc(pc104)+us+ca(fr):2+level3(ralt_switch_for_al ts_toggle):1+level3(ralt_switch_for_alts_toggle):2+group(alts_toggle)" };
        xkb_geometry { include "pc(pc104)" };
};

As you can see, "us english" is still sitting besides french canadian; I just set FR CA to be the default, I was too scared to remove us english. Because I remember doing that could mess up gnome entirely, but I should check that again if I have the courage...

As of the Dapper Beta release, the available layouts under "Canada" are: French Dvorak, French (legacy), Inuktitut, Multilingual, Multilingual first part, Multilingual second part. None of these actually sets the CA layout, FR variant which, I guess, most people use in Quebec. The only workaround I know is to issue "setxkbmap -layout ca -variant fr" or to use KDE, which layout selector can be used to specify the layout and variant correctly.

Do you get the correct layout if you just select "Canada" in the list of countries and press ok? The UI there is a bit quirky and doesn't show that you can actually select unexpanded entries as well.

Yes, when just selecting "Canada", the layout I want to use (i.e. ca(fr)) is selected. As you said, I didn't know I could select "Canada" in itself, and if so, I wouldn't have believed that the default variant for the ca layout was fr. If the variant fr were added explicitly to the list of variants, that would help, even if that means having the same layouts under "Canada" and "Canada (French)". Thanks a lot.

Filed this bug against control-center too.

Seb (or Daniel or who looks at this): The problem is in gnome-keyboard-properties when you click the "add layout", it's very unobvious that just selecting "Canada" (or France or any other item with an expander arrow) is a legal choice.

Since the UI has undergone some improvements I'm closing this report. Thanks again for reporting.