In order for you to properly interact with your Raspberry Pi OS user interface, you should adjust the language and keyboard settings to better fit your needs.
1.Raspberry Pi OS – Change Language Settings
You should change the default language settings to your own language, if that is the language you intend to use and write in. We will show you, where you can do that. Because it can be difficult to change the language settings if you do not understand the language currently running on the operating system.
Tip: Even if the currently used language is not your own, you can still find your way around the menu to change the language settings by looking at the icons on the tiles, which are the same, regardless of which language you use.
First, we open the main menu with the raspberry icon (1). Then we go to the submenu “Settings” (2) and open the menu for “Raspberry Pi Configuration” (3).
Great! Now we can take a first look at the Raspberry Pi setup assistant. Here we can adjust some crucial settings. Most imporant are the language settings.
Go to the “Localisation” menu and then click “Set Locale…”. A small window will now appear above it. There you can choose your language under (3). Under the drop-down menu (4) you can set your country. The character set refers to the encoding for the characters used in texts or menus. The UTF-8 character set is the right one for us and contains the characters used in European languages. We can finalize these changes with “OK” and we are done!
2. Raspberry Pi OS – Changing the keyboard layout
It is quite possible your keyboard may not be set correctly. For example, if you are using a German language keyboard but the keyboard settings are set for English, then you will get the output # even though you are pressing the + button. If you notice any discrepancy of this kind you should adjust your keyboard settings. This should be done right at the beginning, so you don’t have to interrupt your work at a later stage in order to adjust the keyboard settings.
First, we open the main menu with the Raspberry icon (1). After that, we go to the submenu “Settings” (2) and open the menu for “Keyboard and Mouse Settings” (3).
You can test your keyboard’s key assignments with this box (3).
For example, try pressing the keys a b c… and special characters (+ # – . , ) on your keyboard, in order to see if their output is correct.
If not, go to the keyboard menu (“Keyboard”) and select “Keyboard Layout”.
It is very important to choose the correct model (1) of your keyboard. The correct layout (2) and variant (3) can also be adjusted if the standard version of the keyboard model does not match the keyboard you are using. The layout is then automatically adjusted, based on your region and variant selection (3). To confirm these changes simply select “OK”.
Note: The setting “Generic 104-key PC (intl.)” should be the right one for the standard keyboard that came with your computer. Now check again if your keyboard inputs match the keys on your keyboard by using the same box.
Congratulations! You have successfully changed and tested your keyboard setting.