Setting dosemu default keyboard

I have the Debian etch release installed in my P4 box. My locale is Canada, which prescribes the "ca", or Canadian keyboard. So this keyboard is the default in my box.

I also have dosemu 1.4.0 installed. As all of the applications I run from dosemu either require the us keyboard -- or provide their own keyboard mapping, as does WordPerfect 5.1 -- I want to amend the dosemu.conf file to make the us keyboard the system-wide default when using dosemu.

I tried changing the $_layout setting from "auto" to "us", and also to "load us", but I still got on opening dosemu my default "ca" keyboard. Also, without really understanding what I was doing, I tried both those $_layout settings with both the $_external_char_set and $_internal_char_set set to "cp437"; but doing so made no difference either.

So, how do I set the dosemu default keyboard to us, or can I?

Regards,

Ken Heard