X and KVM - an unhappy love story

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 1:30 PM, Soren Hansen <soren at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> The options I see are currently:
>
> 1) Disable this new VNC extension in KVM. It's something we carry as a
> patch, as it's not in kvm proper (for some reason that escapes me).
> Please note that this means that the kvm experience on Ubuntu was vastly
> superior for anyone who is not on a US keymap (which is the default in
> kvm) compared to what you get on any other distro, so it'd be quite a
> shame. Additionally, I have no actually tested this, and it's not
> unthinkable that the full extent of the issues evdev brings upon us has
> been understood yet, so this might not actually fix everything.
>
> 2) Stop using evdev. I frankly have little idea of what the impact of
> this would be.
>
> 3) Fix gtkvnc and sdl (the two frontends that are responsible for doing
> the mapping). It seems that it's possible to detect the presence of
> evdev (sekxkbmap -print knows it), and input-kbd seems to be able to
> give me the mapping from scan-codes to keycodes (and keysyms, but that's
> less interesting), so I *think* the data is available to fix it, but I
> don't have the time to fix it, and I'm not convinced upstream (kvm) has
> enough interest in fixing it in time for our release.

Just for the ever-lasting Internet Archive out there, I thought I
should note that this problem has been solved in Ubuntu Intrepid by
way of option (3), which seemed to be the most complete and correct
solution.

virt-manager (by way of gtk-vnc), kvm, and qemu are all basically
carrying the same patch...a set of keycodes that handle the
translation.

For reference and specifics of the fix, see the discussion and patches
attached to:
 * https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kvm/+bug/258389

:-Dustin