Weird VNC problems with keyboard layout

[Tim Niemueller]

Hi all.

I have really weird problems with VNC, using different servers,
different clients, but every combination has the very same symptoms.

I'm using a German localized Gnome, with the German keyboard layout. Now
if I connect to any remote VNC I cannot type many "special" characters.
This means umlauts as well as regular charaters like a dash (and / being
Shift+6). It is not that it is just an English keyboard layout but it
doesn't seem to be any meaningful keyboard setup that I know. In the
beginning for example I ended up copying dashes for commands until I
figured out how to solve this. And this is even more weird: I added the
US English keyboard layout additionally to the German one. Then I added
the Gnome keyboard applet to my panel. If I now start the VNC
connection, and then switch to "USA" for this window it works, and it
works with the German layout! So then I'm able to type all characters
including Umlauts, although the keyboard layout for this window is set
to US English.

As server I have used an Vine Server for OS X (also known as OSXVnc) as
well as a Qemu-VM started using virt-manager. Clients have been
tightvnc, realvnc, virt-viewer and vinagre (last two then accounting as
gtk-vnc). The system is an F-8 machine. I just found out about this fix
while testing F9Alpha in a VM...

Does anybody know what's going wrong here? Has anybody experienced
similar problems? I don't even know what I would file a bug against.
Because so many programs are affected I'd expect that this is some kind
of Gnome infrastructure problem?

Astonished,
	Tim

-- 
    Tim Niemueller <tim at niemueller.de>      www.niemueller.de
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