I was having a problem getting my keyboard layout to permanently change after I'd installed lubunut-desktop on top of the standard vagrant precice32 VM box. I needed to switch to UK English.
First off - ignore ibus - doesn't seem to work properly.
And - I'd set the language preferences etc to UK - but the keyboard would not change. Making the change using Lxkeymap would work for the session - but the change would be lost after a reboot.
Solution in the end was to edit /etc/default/keyboard. This will then define your keyboard. I set the XKBLAYOUT to "gb" (and XKBVARIANT to "extd" which may/may not be needed).
I then ran (as root)
# dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
and accepted all the defaults. This does not seem to ask about the keyboard layout - so it probably gets it from the /etc/default/keyboard file - but the change is then made and sticks after a reboot.
Not sure what's going on with this error - there are various bug reports - but probably not worth checking out further as this is for 12.04.