fullscreen in xvncviewer blocks F8

[Andrew Jorgensen]

The F8 key is used in xvncviewer to change settings including getting out of
fullscreen mode. Once in this mode the user is stuck in the session because F8
no longer does anything.

[RichardKinder (richard-kinder)]

Confirmed in Ubuntu 5.04.

My experience is a little different - when first entering fullscreen mode, the
keyboard has focus in the fullscreen window. I can hit 'F8' and the vncviewer
menu pops up the first time. If I click fullscreen twice, the keyboard no longer
has focus on the fullscreen vnc window, and anything I type goes to the terminal
I started vncviewer from. Hitting CTRL-C kills the vnc process since focus is in
the original window. I have found no way to get the focus back to the full
screen vncviewer.

Please up the severity to major - this is a nasty issue for the non-technical
user who doesn't know how to work around it.

I will test breezy once it is testable again ;)

[RichardKinder (richard-kinder)]

OK, more info:

This only seems to happen (losing focus in the vncviewer) if I do ALT-TAB - ie
try and shift focus between windows in the vncviewer. Maybe a simple wrapper
script to vncviewer to temporarily disable this shortcut would be a useful
short-term workaround? Long term fix is for ALT-TAB to be sent to the other end
of the vncviewer connection so window cycling works.

[Andrew Jorgensen (ajorg)]

One possible solution is to use the xvnc4viewer package instead of the current
default (v3). It does not have this issue.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Has anyone confirmed this behaviour in Breezy?

[Andrew Jorgensen (ajorg)]

I confirm this bug still exists in Breezy.

I updated my Breezy box just now and tested. Personally I'd love to see
xvnc4viewer replace the 3.x viewer anyway as it supports the more recent
protocol versions.

[Gianni Exile (dub-chamber)]

I confirm the problem is present in breezy. Also, the gnome-panel doesn't work
well with it. Xvncviewer 4 is not stable. While with a 3.x viewer I've had
sessions lasting weeks, the version 4 has never lasted a day.

I never had a problem under Hoary, menus, fullscreen, interaction with other
programs worked fine. Now if I install deb's from Hoary, for xvncviewer and
xaw, I still don't get the old (working perfectly) behaviour.

[Andrew Jorgensen (ajorg)]

Keeping a VNC session open for weeks is not for normal users. I would rather see v4 become the default and bugs filed against it for crashing after a few hours than put effort into making the old v3 version cooperate with gnome.

[admarginem (admarginem)]

yes, I confirm this bug in Dapper on AMD64

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

This is the last comment from the debian bugreport,

"""
If it works with xvnc4viewer that is great. It is the successor of xvncviewer
and therefore I will mark this bug as wontfix. Use vnc4viewer instead
of vncviewer.
"""

Cheers,
 Michael

[Andrew Jorgensen (ajorg)]

I absolutely agree. That would require promotion from universe.

Also, this bug is related to Bug 18004. One of the comments on that bug was that vnc4viewer was not stable enough for the commenter's use case, sessions open weeks at a time. I don't feel like that's a good reason not to move to vnc4. One of the points of vnc is that you can disconnect and reconnect later and if there are stability issues those need to be reported as bugs and fixed.

Also, the version of the older vncviewer we have has the ssh tunneling stuff from TightVNC (-via option). The vnc4viewer doesn't.

Don't get me wrong, I really want to see vnc4viewer become the standard, supported, viewer, and I think this is an important issue for an "enterprise" release, but I also want to be fair about it.

[Andrew Jorgensen (ajorg)]

This bug was confirmed earlier and still exists.

[Mark Reitblatt (mark-reitblatt)]

This (and bug #55688) is still a problem in Feisty. Any chance of getting xvnc4viewer as a replacement in Gutsy?

[libertyernie (libertyernie)]

We should have ubuntu-desktop and edubuntu-desktop depend on xvncviewer OR xvnc4viewer. This way, xvncviewer is the default, but it can be removed in favor of xvnc4viewer without breaking dependences.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Gutsy now depends on xvnc4viewer that fixed this problem.