[Spice-devel] Keyboard layout change on Xspice

[David Mansfield]

On 04/06/2012 03:05 AM, Alon Levy wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 12:52:53PM -0400, David Mansfield wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 04/05/2012 11:58 AM, Alon Levy wrote:
>>> On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 01:24:54PM +0200, Michael Niehren wrote:
>>>> Hi together,
>>>>
>>>> i successfully installed and connected to Xspice und FC16, great work, i was very pleased
>>>> to see, what's possible with spice.
>>>>
>>>> 1 thing left to use it as an Server to connect from my thin client is the keyboard layout.
>>>> As i live in Germany i want to have the german keyboard layout. If i connect with the
>>>> spice-client i only got the english one. Is there a way to change that (i didn's find one)
>>>> ?
>>> (Continuing my previous reply). OK - tried a non english keyboard
>>> (hebrew), and it works fine. The thing to understand is that changing
>>> the keyboard mapping on the client doesn't affect the server - only
>>> changes on the server side affect it. So to get a german keyboard, you'd
>>> need to change the keyboard on the remote side, the server, for instance
>>> I just used "setxkbmap il" to change the keymap to the hebrew one on the
>>> remote side.
>>>
>>
>> I've been troubled by this too, because I use DVORAK mapping.  Is
>> there anything in the pipeline for the spice-agent to address this?
>
> I don't think there is anything to fix, unless I misunderstand - the way
> it works is that the keyboard map is determined by the Xspice Xserver
> entirely, and not by the spice client. That's the way spice keyboard
> works, and it avoids having to encode anything about the keyboard map at
> the spice level. The spice keyboard protocol is the same an AT keyboard
> talks to the pc.
>
> A spice agent would help other things, like copy paste support, and
> better mouse performance for latency laden networks, but has nothing to
> offer for keyboard - I don't see what there is to fix here, maybe you
> can explain.
>

I didn't read that this discussion was specific to Xspice, which while 
I've tried, I was referring to spice access to a VM.  Nevertheless, the 
agent could perhaps be used to automatically set the server-side 
keyboard mapping to that of the client, both in the Xspice and VM case, 
I suppose.

In a perfect-world scenario, the keyboard mapping setting would be 
magically adjusted the client side mapping upon connect.  I'm not saying 
it's the highest priority problem in the world, but it is a bit 
surprising at first when it doesn't work.

Or maybe it's supposed to work in the VM setting and just isn't for me.

Anayway, don't worry about it.

Thanks,
David