[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