Bert's blog

 Open-Future and Reductive Labs are organizing an official Puppet Master training in Brussels.

This training is ideal for those who want a Puppet jumpstart. Newer members at an organization already using Puppet, or experienced sysadmins wanting to bring Puppet into their team will get everything they need to deploy solutions....

If you are interested in following this training, have a look on the Open-Future website.

 A While ago, a customer of ours complained about the keyboard layout not working correctly in a KVM/Qemu guest when connecting with the virt-manager console view. And so... I started investigating.

In KVM/Qemu there's a configuration option which allows you to set the keyboard layout (virsh edit virtual-guest-name):

<graphics type='vnc' port='5902' autoport='no' listen='0.0.0.0' keymap='en-us'/>

The customer was using an azerty(fr-be) keyboard layout so I decided to correct the value in this configuration:

<graphics type='vnc' port='5902' autoport='no' listen='0.0.0.0' keymap='fr-be'/>

Sadly, the keyboard would still not work correctly, the layout for normal keys seemed correct, as the virtual guest spit out 'azerty' in a notepad when actually typing 'azerty', BUT it seemed that other characters, like '@#$\/' etc did not work.

To make sure, I checked bot the Red Hat virtualisation host and guest if the keyboard was set correctly with 'system-config-keyboard'. They were set correctly... I had no Idea what to do next, so I started investigating and lurking around on the net. After lots and lots of searching I stumbled upon a lot of bugreports for KVM, Xen, and virt-manager all claiming keymap issues and some claiming to have worked around it by adding the keymap='...' option. I figured, while this not worked for me, I might try just losing the keymap='...' option like so:

<graphics type='vnc' port='5902' autoport='no' listen='0.0.0.0' />

Surprisingly, this worked, and the keyboard now worked correctly inside the guest, while using the virt-manager console. Yeah!  It seems to be related to faulty keycode conversion by the virt-manager VNC console.

One more problem was left though, as Alt Gr did not seem to work, but this problem proved to not be virt-manager or KVM related, as the virtualisation host did not pick up on AltGr either. This seems to be a bug in NXClient < 3.3.x.

So, are you using a non- en-us keyboard with and you use the virt-manager console? Make sure both the virtualisation guest and host are using the right keyboard layout, and OMMIT the 'keymap=' option from the KVM/Qemu configuration.

Using NXServer? Update your client!

/dev/out