Keystrokes :.

There are several ways to change the keyboard layout in linux.
First, you can load a given keyboard translation tables with :

loadkeys <tablecode>

Alternatively, if you are in a X11 env, you can set the keyboard map using the X Keyboard Extension with:

setxkbmap <kbmapcode>

But if you want to permanently change the console keyboard layout, e.g. in Debian, you can reconfigure console-data and use the wizard to select the desired layout with:

dpkg-reconfigure console-data