[Thinlinc-technical] FreeRDP: Keyboard layout detection

[Rafael Ostertag]

Hi Peter

On 02/11/2014 10:14 AM, Peter Astrand wrote:
>
> FreeRDP and rdesktop uses very different methods for auto-detecting
> the keyboard layout:
>
> * rdesktop checks the "locale", ie language etc set in the
> environment.
Yes. But in our case, the locale is identical for all users. Only the
keyboard layout is different.

What still puzzles me: when we launch rdesktop with `-k de-ch` then the 
client layout is used, be it US, DE_CH, FR_CH, or IT. We don't have to 
fiddle with LANG et. al., nor do we have to call rdesktop with a 
matching `-k' option. It just works (tm).

>
> * FreeRDP, as I understand it, checks the active XKB layout.
>
> None of these methods are perfect. The FreeRDP method, however, is
> problematic in a remote desktop environment, because the server side
> XKB layout might not match the local client side keyboard layout.
I hear you :)

> You can connect and reconnect from different terminals with different
> keyboard layouts, or even be simultaneiously connected to the same
> session from two clients with different keyboards...
>
> So what you want in this context is getting FreeRDP to determine the
>  keyboard layout from the locale. Don't know if this is possible
> though, but you can of course try to create a FreeRDP wrapper script
> that calls freerdp with different options depending on $LANG.

Personally, I'd prefer to have some sort of command on the agents, that 
could query the VSM Server for certain properties of the client, such as 
keyboard layout, IP Addr etc.

Creating a wrapper would be easy then.

Thanks a lot.

cheers
rafi

-- 
Rafael Ostertag, Technischer Assistent
Institut für Mathematik, Universität Zürich
Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zürich, Office: Y27-J40
Tel: ++41 (0)44 63-55866, rafael.ostertag at math.uzh.ch