Recovering the special characters view

There is a rather handy app called "Keyboard mod." that allows you to modify the key layout of the special characters view, i.e., the small virtual keyboard which pops up when you press the Ctrl and Symbol key.
Alas, you may end up with a layout that does not work — and this means that the special characters view simply won't pop up any longer when you press these buttons. This is exactly what has happened to me. Unfortunately, there is no backup of the original keyboard layouts. Here's a quick fix that worked for me:

1. Install the package gainroot if you have not done so yet.


2. Open an X term and type in the following commands:


3. root (Obtain administrator rights. Alternative: sudo gainroot)


4. cd /usr/share/scv_layouts (Go to the directory where the broken file is located.)


5. ls -lt


6. You now see a list of .vkb files. Most of these should carry the same time stamp (on my device, it's Dec 3rd, 2009), with the exception of the one that you fucked up. :-) The files are sorted by modification date, so the evildoer should be at the top of this list.


7. If you're a lucky man, you can somewhere get hold of an original version of the .vkb file. Then you can simply download the file and overwrite the broken one.
   I, however, was not so lucky. Thus, as an ugly quick-fix, I simply copied one of the untouched files to the one that I messed up. In my special case, I thus replaced de.vkb by ch.vkb. But before you do that, you should do a backup of the broken and the other .vkb files:


8. mkdir /home/user/MyDocs/vkb-files (You should not call this directory .vkb-files with a leading dot, since that has a somewhat special meaning in Unix systems.)


9. mv de.vkb /home/user/MyDocs/vkb-files/de.vkb.broken (Create a backup of the broken file: The overwriting quick-hack will mean that you'll get a double entry for one language! Perhaps you can fix the broken one at a later point in time, using a new version of the app.)


10. cp *.vkb /home/user/MyDocs/vkb-files/ (You now have a safe backup of the remaining and untouched files... who knows if you'll need that one day)
    
11. cp ch.vkb de.vkb (Warning: you probably have to replace the de and ch, depending on your situation!)

That's everything.
I hope I'll find the original versions of the .vkb files. In that case, I'll offer them for download.