Sunday, June 1, 2008

Hardy Heron and VMware annoyance


Ever tried using Hardy with VMware workstation or Server ?

Try launching a windows VM (virtual machine) inside and switch it to full-screen or quick view mode .
Then come back to Hardy , you will find that the Shift and Control keys don't work anymore !
Switch context to the windows VM again , they seems to work fine inside it.
This problem is intermittent and the only way I can fix it is to run "setxkbmap" (I got this from Launchpad Bug #195982)

Running setxkbmap alleviates the problem only for a short while.
It will reappear intermittently , on switching contexts.

I use my laptop with a secondary monitor . My laptop runs Hardy and my production (official) machine is a windows xp guest running on VMware .
I have the guest use the secondary monitor in full-screen mode and Hardy takes my laptop screen.
To switch contexts (which I do often) , I simply move my mouse cursor to the other screen (they are spanned with nvidia twinview)

Since there seems to be no solution for this bug yet , I have created a custom launcher in the gnome panel for running setxkbmap (See image) . I click the launcher whenever the damn bug pops up !

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

yout every time to fix this problem IT SUCKS :(

Anonymous said...

arg it got cut off

i had bee going to key-board prefs every time and changin my layout but this is much bett. hope they fix this soon

Anonymous said...

same here. This bug is stupid, vmware knows it since Workstation 6.0.2.

I run a process

while true; do setxkbmap; sleep 1; done

in the background. So far no side effects.