Bugzilla – Bug 151481
TightVNC produces extra characters from keyboard
Last modified: 2006-02-20 17:08:03 UTC
VNC produces extra, false characters when I type on the keyboard. The most common false characters are '2' after '"', and ',' after '|'. That is, if I type shift-2 for '"', I get a '2' after it. Seems that the problem is in key repetition: If I press shift, '2', and release the shift before '2', I immediately get '"2'. The same goes for '|', if I release altgr before '<', I get '|,' and sometimes the ',' tends to get stuck, so I get '|,,,,,,,,,,,,'... until I hit another button. I suffered from this bug as early as SuSE 9.2 times. That time I resolved it by compiling tightvnc from original source. I haven't tested what happens if I compile the tightvnc from OpenSuse source.rpm. To reproduce, at least this way I have hit the bug in two different computers: Update SuSE 9.2 PRO to OpenSuse 10.0: select http://ftp.linux.ee/pub/suse/opensuse/inst-source as installation source, Update System. Boot to X, create vncserver, vncviewer localhost:1, the xterm should open automatically, in that xterm try shift down - 2 down - shift up - and you should get '"2'. Keyboard finnish, < in between left shift and Z. archy@spirjr:~> locale LANG=en_US LC_CTYPE="en_US" LC_NUMERIC="en_US" LC_TIME="en_US" LC_COLLATE="en_US" LC_MONETARY="en_US" LC_MESSAGES="en_US" LC_PAPER="en_US" LC_NAME="en_US" LC_ADDRESS="en_US" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US" LC_ALL= archy@spirjr:~> uname -a Linux spirjr 2.6.13-15-default #1 Tue Sep 13 14:56:15 UTC 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux archy@spirjr:~> rpm -qa|grep vnc tightvnc-1.2.9-186 xorg-x11-Xvnc-6.8.2-100 kdenetwork3-vnc-3.4.2-11 archy@spirjr:~> Computer P4/2.6GHz desktop. Another computer, Celeron 2 GHz laptop, the same bug exists, no matter if locale is en_GB or en_US.UTF-8.
I think this only depends on the keyboard settings, not on the locale. VNC is known to have problems with non-US keyboard settings. I think this has been known to the authors for years, but they haven't fixed it so far.