keyboard type does not appear to be known to VirtualBox

[gerard henry]

hello all, this is my problem: ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=27282

hopefully, it works with rdesktop

Attached is the log file.

[gerard henry]

on my laptop, the keyboard is a French one

[Michael Thayer]

Forum posting follows

=====================

hello all,

i'm using VB thru a VNC session on my opensolaris laptop, here is my config, the first line representing the machines involved, and the second one the programs used

laptop running opensolaris -- sparc server running opensolaris -- intel server running opensolaris
TigerVNC client ------------- VNC server ------------------------ VB 3.1.2 with solaris 10 as guest

Everything will be ok except the keyboard. On my laptop, where i have a french keyboard, when i want to type a number, that's not a number which is displayed, very annoying when i have to set the DNS.

I also did a test with a sun keyboard type 6 (with numeric pad) without success. Even the "." is echoed as ">"

Anybody can help?

thanks in advance,

gerard

[Michael Thayer]

I'm not very clued up about VNC, so I will have to understand your setup (and how VNC passes keypress data!) before I can comment. Could you explain to me why there are three systems involved? I would have expected the VNC server to be running on the Intel machine.

[gerard henry]

you're right, forget the sparc server, just 2 machines involved:

• first with VirtualBox and VNC-server
• second with VNC-client

[Michael Thayer]

Out of interest, what output do you get when you run "xev" on the server machine (instead of VirtualBox) and press the same key without and with shift pressed (say if you press the "; ." key without and with shift). I suspect that you will see a different keycode in the output, as though you had pressed different keys. And what happens if you set the keyboard layout on the server machine to US before starting VirtualBox?

[gerard henry]

here are the output of xev when doing:

- press "." on the laptop -> screenshot 1
- press "." into VNC client -> screenshot 2

[gerard henry]

screenshot 1

[gerard henry]

screenshot 2

[gerard henry]

Replying to michael:

Out of interest, what output do you get when you run "xev" on the server machine (instead of VirtualBox) and press the same key without and with shift pressed (say if you press the "; ." key without and with shift). I suspect that you will see a different keycode in the output, as though you had pressed different keys.

i forgot the keycode when pressing "." is 47

[gerard henry]

Replying to michael:

And what happens if you set the keyboard layout on the server machine to US before starting VirtualBox?

another point is that i was forced to set the keyboard to en-us when installing a guest thru VNC, whatever the guest is (debian or opensolaris). Else, VB sees a qwerty keyboard (an "a" on my laptop becomes a "q" into VB thru VNC)

[Michael Thayer]

If XKB works on your setup then the fix for ticket #2595 might help you too.

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.