Avian’s Blog

If you are getting annoying error messages like these every time you start GNOME or try to change the keyboard layout with gnome-keyboard-preferences and if setxkbmap seems to be working fine, check if you have this file: /etc/X11/xkb/xkbcomp. If you don't have it, try to find it somewhere (I found it in /usr/X11R6/bin) and make a symlink like this:

$ ln -s /usr/X11R6/bin/xkmcomp /etc/X11/xkm/xkbcomp

Why exactly one needs to spend a couple of hours stracing various Gnome binaries to get to this conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader (hint: try running a rogue gnome-settings-daemon from a terminal).