Broken keymap using Tightvnc w/ Gnome

[Carl F.]

Binary package hint: keymapper

PLEASE NOTE: I HAVE NO IDEA WHICH PACKAGE IS IMPLICATED IN THIS BUG.
THE BUG REPORT FORM WOULD NOT ACCEPT THE "I DON'T KNOW" RADIO BUTTON.

WHOEVER INTERCEPTS THIS, PLEASE CHANGE TO PACKAGE UNKNOWN. THANKS.

This bug was reported against Feisty as #112955 and persists in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

When using Gnome with Tightvnc, the keymap is broken, making the keyboard
completely unuseable. There is a work-around, but it's an ugly one, not suitable
for a business of any size.

I can add what I suspect is an important symptom.

When the keymap is broken and keys are struck in alphabetical order, i.e.
     'a b c d e f g'
what is echoed is:
     'a s d f g h k'

This suggests to me that character values in simple ascending order have
been mapped in error to qwerty order.

I don't know any linux internals, and so cannot guess which package(s) might
be implicated. But I did a vanilla install of the production release of Ubuntu 7.x
a few weeks ago, which had massive problems using Gnome with Tightvnc.
I then did a vanilla upgrade to the production 8.04 LTS release, which fixed the
massive Gnome-vnc problem, but exposed this other, year-old bug.

All this by way of saying that I've done no special package installation, outside
of what the standard 8.04 upgrade does for itself.

Still, the bug fix should be as simple as adjusting a poorly built table, or perhaps finding
and fixing the few lines of code that generate / over-write the table. (If a programmer
were malicious, this error could be introduced with a single, cryptic for(;;) statement.)

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Carl F.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This sounds to me as though tightvnc is failing to cope with the keycodes generated by the "evdev" X input driver. (I don't know much more than this, so please don't ask me for more guesswork; you'd have to consult X experts, maybe #ubuntu-x on irc.freenode.net?)

[hejkki (heikki-kniivila)]

i can confirm that this bug exists. i have the same issue.

[Andre Albuquerque (andreda)]

Same issue for me!

[Tpugliese (thomas-pugliese)]

I would like to point out that this problem does not occur with the vnc4server package. Unfortunately, vnc4server is too slow to be usable over my internet connection.

[higuita (higuita)]

by http://blog.yclian.com/2007/12/3-solutions-to-gnomevnc-keyboard.html , we have a workaround...

Add the line below in the $HOME/.vnc/xstartup , before the gnome-session startup
export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1

Example:

# in .vnc/xstartup
xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1
export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE
gnome-session &

As this is soo old (at least 4 years) and still isnt fixed, a permament workaround should be addin to the gnome-sesson script a check like this:

if [ ! -z $VNCDESKOP ] ; then
  XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1
  export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE
fi

This should be put by default in gnome in ubuntu (and debian and gnome, etc), as AFAIK, there is no side effects in VNC sessions

other solution is not to use gnome in vnc, but that seens stupid :)

[upandacross (bren-upandacross)]

I found this problem solution in another thread and the XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1 fix works great - now I can use an XP desktop as a thin client to my Karmic server. You mentioned the "gnome-session script" fix that seems user independent. Where, exactly, is this file? Do you know if this is just a problem running a remote desktop on a Microsoft system?

[Nelson Lago (lago)]

Server (running Xtightvnc) is karmic, client (running vinagre) is maverick. I have the same problem, and XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1 solves it. There are lots of messages and bug reports on this since feisty, including weird suggestions to disable gnome-session or set up an invalid keymap.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Carl F. et. al., this is not reproducible. If this is reproducible in a supported release, please file a new report via a terminal:
ubuntu-bug tightvncserver

Please feel free to subscribe me to it.