Additional information about BiCon's behavior ============================================= BiCon behaves differently if called as "bicon" or "bicon.bin", and also started from the console (or a tty) versus in a graphical environment. BiCon ships two keymaps: arabic.map.gz and ir.map.gz and some console fonts, mainly bicon-8x16-512.psfu.gz. It can be started as "bicon" or "bicon.bin" If started as "bicon" it sets the keymap or keyboard layout in a way that depends whether the "bicon" command is given or not an argument. 1) If started as "bicon" from the console. If a two characters country code is given as argument it is considered to choose the keymap, else the country (or "territory" to be accurate) part of LANG is used. _ If the country (converted to lowercase letters) is found in this list: ae dz eg iq jo ko kw lb ly ma om qa sa sd sy tn ye then the keymap "arabic" is chosen. _ If the country is "IR" or "ir" then the keymap "ir" is chosen. The font bicon-8x16-512 is always used with its Unicode map. IMPORTANT. You won't be able to use the "setfont" command after having started bicon as a regular user. You will have to tentatively become root with "su" to change the font if you want. 2) If started as "bicon" from an X terminal. You will need to use an UTF-8 able or enabled terminal. A switchable keyboard layout (us + the language that correspond to the country set by the user or found in LANG) is set. IMPORTANT: _ BiCon doesn't set the font. You'll have to do that yourself. Be careful to use a font including the needed glyphs. _ BiCon sets the "option" for the X server to: "grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll" and the "layout" to: "us," This will override the key combination that you possibly have set in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-keyboard-layout.conf to toggle keyboards. But you can change the settings made by BiCon with a command like this one (after having started BiCon, of course): setxkbmap \ -display "$DISPLAY" \ -layout "," \ -option " \ -print | \ xkbcomp -w 2 - "$DISPLAY" 3) If started as bicon.bin, BiCon doesn't load any font or keyboard. You might prefer it that way if you want to keep your own settings. Reference: file bin/bicon.in in the source archive. See also: _ man bicon _ man bicon.bin _ documents in /usr/doc/bicon- Didier Spaier , 27/07/2015