[Thinlinc-technical] XKB based keyboard switching not working...

[Jens Langner]

Hello ThinLinc users,

we are a relatively new user group using ThinLinc and we are quite happy so far in using ThinLinc throughout our department. However, there is currently one major problem which still prevents several of our international users to connect to our ThinLinc-based Linux systems. And I want to raise that problem here in the hope that some of the users or ThinLinc-developers provide a solution:

We actually have several users which want to be able to switch keyboard layout during runtime (when connected to the ThinLinc system). In fact, we do have a russian user which want to be able to use the "setxkbmap" command to specify a german and russian keyboard layout (in addition to seeing cyrillic chars) and be able to switch between the both by using a shortcut. Other international users also want to be able to switch the keyboard layout for certain reasons using the standard GUI tools either in LXDE or also via setxkbmap. This was perfectly possible with our previous SunRay-based installation.
However, first thing we discovered is that the XKB extension is disabled per default in ThinLinc. After switching the xkb extension on by added "+kb" to the "xserver_args" option in vsmagent.conf the problem seem to be solved at the a first sight as the setxkbmap command didn't return an error anymore.

However, after further testing we found out that certain keyboard layouts are completely messed up as soon as the XKB extension is turned on in ThinLinc. First of all, we use german as the default keyboard layout and with the XKB extension turned off every key works fine and as expected. However, as soon as we switch on the XKB extension and our german users login the Alt-Gr key seems to be messed up as they cannot access the Backslash "\" and pipe "|" key anymore. In addition, if trying to switch to an "us" keyboard layout using setxkbmap certain other keys are also messed up.

Here we are using Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04 based systems with different window manager environments (lxde, gnome, fvwm) and have discovered that all of them show the same behavior. 

Have anyone else discovered the same problem and might have a solution for us? Currently we have the XKB extension switched off and force the users to select the correct keyboard layout on the client side before they connect to the ThinLinc server. However, this is really only a short-term solution for us as our users really have to be able to switch keyboard layouts while they are connected using shortcuts or GUI tools or by setxkbmap.

best regards,
jens
-- 
Dr. Jens Langner
Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf
Institute of Radiopharmaceutical Cancer Research
Department of Positron Emission Tomography
POB 51 01 19, 01314 Dresden, Germany
http://www.hzdr.de/ | +49 351 260 2757

Vorstand: Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Roland Sauerbrey
Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Peter Joehnk
VR 1693 beim Amtsgericht Dresden

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