Vino (vnc) + StickyKeys causes keyboard hangups

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

If you access a machine running a vnc server such as vino which is has the Gnome
keyboard feature 'SkickyKeys' enabled, you get serious lock-ups, like not being
able to type things into a terminal. The Mouse seems to react poorly as well.
Switching off StickyKeys resolves the problem.

If you are a user of sticky keys, you generally shouldn't need to run it on the
remote machine (but rather on the local one where you have the vnc client). The
issue was discovered when trying to test GOK accross a vnc connection. GOK
switches on SkickyKeys by default (which I consider to be a GOK useability
issue, which I'll report elsewhere).

I logged this bug under 'vino' but it might of course be a StickyKeys bug (what
package is that in?)

This was tested on breezy.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324801: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324801

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Thanks for your bug report. Do you have trouble and keyboard lockups on the box,
where the vnc server ran?

[Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik)]

Yes, the box where the vnc server runs. I ran the client (tightvnc) on a Windows
box. I'll test it later with the client running Ubuntu as well.

What actually happens that the stickyness of keys gets activated at seemingly
random times (I'll test more to try to figure out what causes it), including
when you just minimise and restore the client vnc window. When Alt or Ctrl are
pressed down and you try to perform normal actions, the results are seemingly
unpredictable ...

If you add the sticky keys monitoring applet to the launcher area you can at
least see when keys have been made sticky, which does reduce the confusion.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. If you use the box where the vnc server ran
(sitting in front of it), does itself have those issues too? (not via vnc / vino)

[Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik)]

Oh, I see. No it does not happen when you use the machine directly. Even when
both StickyKeys and vino are enabled everything seems to behave itself. It's
first when to start sending inputs from the remote machine that keys get stuck
when they shouldn't.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

I forwarded the issue to the upstream bug tracker:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324801

[hendry (hendry-webc)]

I found this bug in dapper. I would say its very serious.

The host X server has to be restarted after the client disconnects. The host's keyboard and mouse doesn't work properly after the client disconnects.

I don't know where stickykeys is enabled or disabled.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Do you still have the problem?

[Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik)]

Yes still happens on Feisty systems.

[Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik)]

We now ship the Vinagre VNC client by default and I actually no longer see this problem in either Vino or Vinagre. You sometimes get asked if you want to disable sticky keys,but that is just a minor nuisance.