[Thinlinc-technical] FreeRDP: Keyboard layout detection

[Tobias Oetiker]

Hi Rafael,

as far as I understand it, freerdp acts on a lower level re
keyboard than rdesktop, as such it does not 'see' as much as
rdesktop. The advantage is that the windows gets more immediate
access to keyobard events, the disadvantage ist that cool things
like the compose key do not work with freerdp.

https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP-old/issues/43

and then

https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/issues/98

cheers
tobi

Yesterday Rafael Ostertag wrote:

> 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
>
>

-- 
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