Keymap issues with NX from Mac OS X Lion [duplicate]

Question

I tried to answer the question from Mark:

Keymap issues with NX from Mac OS X Lion to Ubuntu

However, it is locked so I figured I would post a new question / answer.

I have been trying to answer this for a few days now because I have no issues when connecting through NX Client (technically OpenNX) to FreeNX server from an iMac (with Lion), but if I try to connect with a Macbook Pro I get horrible keyboard binding issues.

Optimist

Could you please contact me directly (I'm the maintainer of OpenNX) via SourceForge. I got several more questions about that. – Bungle

I'm having this issues as well and this did NOT fix my problem. – Milkwhite

With version 0.16.0.649 I had the same problem, I switched back to version 0.16.0.648 and there the keyboard mapping is correct (10.7, Mac OS X Lion). So version 0.16.0.648 fixed the problem for me. – Contortionist

This worked for me. The default seems to be "current keyboard="true" and then "custom keyboard layout" is ignored, and in the GUI, if I manually select a keyboard, it sets "current keyboard"="false" and "custom keyboard layout"="us" -- which also doesn't work. The recommendation from this post seems to put it in a state you can't get into with the GUI, where you're requesting a specific keyboard layout that doesn't exist... but it works. – Frustrate

This worked on a MacBook Pro using the internal keyboard, but didn't work on a Mac Pro using a non-Apple keyboard. I don't know if that's the salient difference, but I'm using the same OS version on both, and connecting to the same remote session (served by NoMachine's nx server). I followed the other suggestion here, and used opennx version 0.16.0.648, and that worked for me on the Mac Pro. – Frustrate

I couldn't get either 0.649 with above fix or reverting to 0.648 to work from Lion Macbook Air with Gnome. The keyboard is not completely messed up but, for example, pressing 'd' closes my gnome-terminal. However, starting a KDE session works fine with no keyboard issues. – Inexplicit

I am having the same problem described above. So should I change the values of "Current Keyboard", etc to the values mentioned above? Else what values should I specify? – Unexceptionable

Answer 1

I had the same issue (I'am on a Macbook Air with OSX 10.7 Lion) and reverting back to 0.16.0.648 fixed the problem for me too.

Spickandspan

Answer 2

The fix that is working for me is to go into:

~/.nx/config/HOST.nxs

and change:

<option key="Current keyboard" value="false"/>
<option key="Custom keyboard layout" value="empty"/>
<option key="Grab keyboard" value="false"/>

I have tried this on three NX Servers and all are fixed. Hope it helps or gets you closer. Always check in the ~/.nx/temp/ for the sshlog and see if --keyboard="empty/empty" instead of "pc105/en" because the Mac is really pc104.

9:05:35: startsession --session="HOST" --type="unix-gnome" --cache="8M" --images="32M" --link="adsl" --geometry="2556\ x1396" --screeninfo="2560x1440x32+render" --keyboard="empty/empty" --backingstore="1" --encryption="1" --composite="1" --\ shmem="1" --shpix="1" --streaming="1" --samba="0" --cups="0" --nodelay="1" --defer="0" --client="macosx" --media="0" --st\ rict="0" --aux="1"

Redouble

Answer moved out of question – Redouble

Answer 3

I'm on a Macbook Air with OSX 10.8.4. I've tried release 648, 649, and 725 of OpenNX to connect to Ubuntu 13.04. Each didn't work out of the box and even with the above trick of editing my profile's cfg, my keyboard mapping still isn't right. (The sshlog shows '--keyboard="empty/empty"')

Once connected, in all of these cases, the 'd' key minimizes all open windows, the up arrow key maximizes the current window, and the down key restores it to its original size. My point is that with all of the above attempts changing something on the Mac OpenNX client, I'm starting to think the problem is something Canonical has done with Ubuntu 13.04 and/or FreeNX. That latter doesn't look like its been updated since I had to install it from the 12.xx ppa.

As a further datapoint, even X2Go connections exhibit the exact same behavior when using the Gnome desktop. In the X2Go case, the client dialog shows using a pc105/us keyboard.

I hope this gives others something to go on. I couldn't add this as a comment so had to do it as an answer, sorry.

Kuehnel

Answer 4

I had this problem with 10.7.5, the fix was to install XQuartz instead of the native X server. Well, mostly fix. The CAPS LOCK is inverted, that is, it's all caps when it's off and normal when it's on but otherwise the keyboard works with XQuartz. Installation is easy and it didn't break anything else on the Mac. Although what is working even better for me was to load Ubuntu on the Mac, right now I have it setup dual-boot.

Optional