Sometimes even the letters are garbled. The first three are named after the first six letter keys, and roughly represent the English, German and French speaking coun- tries. Keyboard hardware reset Things may be wrong on a lower level than Linux knows about. Keyboards can often be programmed to use one out of three different sets of scancodes. However, I do not know of cases where this turned out to be a problem.
Some keyboards have a remapping capability built in.
Delete and Backspace Getting Delete and Backspace to work just right is nontrivial, especially in a mixed environment, where you talk to console, to X, to bash, to emacs, login remotely, etc. You may have to edit several configuration files to tell all of the programs involved precisely what you want. If the character is erased, but in a funny way, then something is wrong with your tty settings. Most people will want stty echoe -echoprt. Saying stty sane will do this and more.