Make Yubikey working with non-us keyboard layouts
Út 09 dubna 2013
My employer started to use system which allows using Yubikey for authentication [added later: the most important thing is that whole system is Open Source, which is very very good thing], so I have finally gave up and bought one myself as well. It works really well, and comparing to the previous system it is both smaller and more convenient to use (not mentioning that the previous system has been compromised).
The only problem I had with it is, that in order to be ultra-secure it doesn't allow much configuration (my version of Yubikey doesn't have use-numeric-keypad option) so with my default Czech keyboard, it didn't work, and I had to switch all the time between Czech and US keyboard manually.
The first option seemed to be to use custom configuration snippet as described in the Fedora Wiki and create a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory with content like:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "keyboard defaults"
MatchProduct "Yubic Yubico Yubikey II"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
Option "XKbOptions" ""
EndSection
Unfortunately, this solution doesn’t work with Gnome, which controls input devices dynamically and overrides Xorg defaults.
Finally, I have found the solution with very kind help of Peter Hutterer and his blogpost on Custom input device configuration in GNOME. When the example script from gnome-settings-daemon is modified to include the configuration, it could also set Yubikey (and only Yubikey) input device to us keyboard layout. The key part is:
case "$1" in
Yubico*)
echo "Setting Yubikey layout"
setxkbmap -device $2 -layout us
;;
esac
Whole script is https://gitlab.com/mcepl/input-device-configuration/blob/master/input-device-config.sh
