[X] Change keyboard layout/mapping on the fly on the console

I booted into a live USB Gentoo system, but even though I selected german key mapping just after the boot process started, the KDE desktop used the american layout - somewhat annoying, especially since I was not able to graphically select a german layout. The where just 8 selectable but german was not amongst, swiss would not help a lot and I was unable to install more layouts. One at irc channel #gentoo told me, I could issue the following on the command line and it works just great.

setxkbmap -verbose de

[lvm2] no devices after reboot

I was installing a Gentoo system on lvm partitions. While doing so, the system of the live USB stick froze and I had to reboot. However, no lvm devices where present in /dev even though I successfully displayed the volume group (vgdisplay) and the logical volumes (lvdisplay). The point is, that after the boot volume groups are deactivated so I had to activate them. I had this info from #gentoo IRC channel but was too dump to record it somewhere accessible because I had to shutdown my system to go home. It took me a good deal of time to find the solution again on the net but here it is:

vgchange --activate y vg_sata