Console-setup sucks
I have a few reasons for this:
- It wants to change the framebuffer font without asking. I seriously dislike the font it sets up.
- I have a habit of writing my own Xkb keymap. With xorg <= 7.3, that meant creating a file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/wouter and having something like Option "XkbLayout" "wouter" in xorg.conf. Console-setup doesn't pick that up, though, and loads a default keymap that somehow looks closely similar to what I'm using.
- What's worse, the default keymap it picks up on my Apple Powerbook (which isn't my primary laptop anymore, but considering how my actual primary laptop is in for repairs, is what I need to use for now) is a PC Belgian AZERTY keymap, rather than the Apple AZERTY. This is *wrong*.
I might understand why they did this kind of thing, but the current implementation of autodetection is horribly broken.
Providing your own symbols file is not the right way anyway, and if only since you are writing to /usr. Read http://madduck.net/docs/extending-xkb/ .
Also, instead of your negative sentiments, it would help to see constructive bug reports.
Finally, console-setup doesn't "choose" anything by default. You either have a misconfigured HAL-setup, answered the debconf questions wrongly, or didn't answer them at all (dpkg-reconfigure -plow...)
… on most parts. I use xmodmap to load mine though, because I never could get the hang of the less well documented xkb stuff.
I seriously dislike the font loaded too though ☺
I use a custom xkb keymap in both console-setup and KDE (Xorg 7.4). I know I had to add a line in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst to use it in the KDE keyboard applet/config. But it works without any problem with console-setup.