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

[Tobias Oetiker]

Hi Jens,

Today Jens Langner wrote:

> 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.

we are using xkb with sun-international keyborads, there it works
fine, but we recently tried with swiss-german keyboards and failed
completely ...

I think the next version of thinlinc is going to support xkb
properly ...

cheers
tobi

-- 
Tobi Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Aarweg 15 CH-4600 Olten, Switzerland
http://it.oetiker.ch tobi at oetiker.ch ++41 62 775 9902 / sb: -9900