Type Colemak

Here is a screenshot of Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” alpha 4, freshly booted up from the live CD. The first thing I did before anything else was load up the keyboard preferences:

Sure enough, there it is. So far, Colemak is only available for the US keyboard layout, but it’s a start.

To switch to Colemak:

• Go to System > Preferences > Keyboard
• Choose the “Layouts” tab
• Click “Add”
• Under “Layouts” choose “US” and under “Variants” choose “Colemak”
• Click “Add”
• Select Colemak as the default layout (or even better, remove the existing qwerty one)
• Click “Close” and you’re done.

The final production release of Hardy Heron is scheduled for April 24th. Hardy is also one of their LTS (long term support) releases, so it’s a pretty good time for Colemak to make its debut in a desktop OS.