Weird VNC problems with keyboard layout

[Dan Winship]

Tim Niemueller wrote:
> 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.

That is weird. It sounds like either the client or the server is trying
to be "clever", and failing. Have you tried vncviewer from the vnc
package as a client? It's an awful client, but it does a very basic
implementation of the protocol, so if the keyboard works right under
vncviewer and not under the other clients, it's probably those clients'
fault. Otherwise, it's probably the servers' fault.

> 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.

It may help if you make sure the server is using the same keyboard
layout as the client. (When using vino as a vnc server, for instance,
it's only possible to type keys that are in the intersection of the
client and server keyboard layouts, because of limitations in X.) This
is probably more likely to help with vnc servers that export "real"
sessions (ie, sessions attached to a physical monitor and a keyboard)
than with ones that create entirely virtual sessions.

-- Dan