Re: [Qemu-devel] Keysymbol interpretation missing in QEMU's VNC server?

[Fabian Holler <fabian.holler@profitbricks.com>]

Hello Philipp,

thanks for your answer.

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 09:24:13PM +0100, Philipp Hahn wrote:
> On Wednesday 07 March 2012 11:53:57 Fabian Holler wrote:
> > I'm not sure if I found a bug in QEMU's VNC keyboard layout mapping or
> > if it's a general problem in the implemented VNC server:
> 
> Daniel P. Berrangé has written some very good blog entries about the VNC 
> problem: 
> <http://berrange.com/posts/2010/07/04/more-than-you-or-i-ever-wanted-to-know-about-virtual-keyboard-handling/>
> They're quiet technical, but after reading them I at least concluded that VNC 
> is normally just broken.

I already discovered Berrangès articles, helped me very lot to
understand the problem.

> I recommend using virt-viewer, with which I have mostly no such problems.

Ah, never heard of it, it seems also be gtk-vnc based.
I already tried gtk-vnc and it works but we need a Web based solution
for our customers.
I found Java VNC (http://www.jdams.org/java-vnc), which also sends the
QEMU extended key event messages (based on TigerVNC). But in the JVM is
the same old problem that the scan code/key code isn't known.

So our current plan is to let the customer choose his
local keyboard layout in the applet and recover the key code for the key
symbol (+ add/remove if needed metakey events like shift) on the client.

Similar like QEMU's "-k" option, but on the client-side +
interpretation. We will only can support a limited number of keyboard
layouts but changing the layout without restarting QEMU will be
possible. :-)


regards

Fabian