All European users of almost any operating system have two problems: The first is to tell the computer that you have a non-American keyboard, and the second is to get the computer to display the special letters. To make matters worse the applications themselves will also consider you an exception if you are not an American and require special options or the setting of environment variables.
Under Linux you change the way your computer interprets the
keyboard with the commands xmodmap and loadkeys. loadkeys
will modify the keyboard for plain Linux while xmodmap makes
the modifications necessary when the handshaking between X11 and Linux
is imperfect.
To display the characters you need to tell your applications that you use the ISO-8859-Latin-1 international set of glyphs. Mostly this is not necessary, but a number of key applications need special attention.
This HOWTO is intended to tell Danish users how to do this. If
you continue to have troubles after reading this you should try the
German HOWTO, the Keystroke HOWTO for Linux or the ISO 8859-1
FAQ. Many of the hints contained herein are cribbed from there. You
should also send me a mail describing your troubles. The HOWTOs are
available from all respectable mirrors of sunsite.unc.edu
while the ISO 8859-1 FAQ is available from
ftp.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at in /pub/8bit/FAQ-ISO-8859-1.
A final problem is that error-messages, menus and documentation of
applications always are in English. There's a GNU project underway to
address this problem. You can see what it's all about by downloading
the file gettext-0.9.tar.gz or a later version from your
favourite mirror of prep.ai.mit.edu. This project needs
volunteers for the translations. Send a mail to da-request@li.org
with the body "subscribe" if you want to contribute to the Danish part
of the project.