Comment 46 for bug 58083

There's another solution available, with a less drastic fix: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=309424

In short, this distilled down to removing the existing /usr/share/X11/xkb (e.g. renaming it to .xkb-broken or something) and linking /usr/share/X11/xkb to /etc/X11/xkb:

    cd /usr/share/X11
    sudo mv xkb .xkb-broken
    sudo ln -s ../../../etc/X11/xkb/

Further investigation seems to indicate that the xkb-data-legacy package will provide everything we need, but that package has dependencies that will regress your system badly.

But I see the fact that we can't fix it in the distro proper as a major setback. Is it considered low risk enough to include something like this symlink in the xkb-data package, and thus fix it within the distro?

That sounds better to me than Seb having to track these packages, and users having to manually install them for the life of Edgy.