swap Caps Lock key with Ctrl key

I have been using Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHK) for about decade. It’s really nice one, but it becomes lame at last and key touch is quite noisy. So I bought a cheap English layout keyboard at amazon. (good-by HHK)

The problem here is that “caps lock” resides in the left-middle. This is quite inconvenient. So I replaced “caps lock” key with “control” by configuring keyboard mapping.

Here is its procedure on ubuntu 13.04 (LXDE) to do so.

Edit keyboard file and applying argument “ctrl:swapcaps” for XKBOPTIONS option.

$ cd /etc/default
$ diff keyboard keyboard.org
11,12c11
< #XKBOPTIONS=""
< XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:swapcaps"
---
> XKBOPTIONS=""

Or you can specify “ctrl:nocaps” in case that you assign control key for both.

Then execute dpkg-reconfigure command so that above change will take effect. Please be noted that rebooting system has no effect for this keyboard configuration change and it remains as they were.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

Answer to questions given by command and at last stage you will be prompted if you save above configuration change.

Following emacs page has quite comprehensive explanation for this sake, which helps must help you.

And following debian page has explanation as to keyboard configuration.

Please be noted, above dpkg-reconfigure command updates initrd.img-X.X.X-XX-generic file under /boot directory. Therefore in case that OS updates image file, then you have to re-execute dpkg-reconfigure command to reflect change onto image file.

Please be noted that there seems to be more work to be done, as change of configuration is lost after rebooting system. sorry...

It seems that following thread shall be similar issue of this.