Alt-gr key not sent to Debian VM

[pioupiou]

Hello, 

I have a Debian VM configure French keyboard. On the Debian VM, I set the French keyboard and when I display the keyboard, all key are display well and in their place. The keyboard local is fr_FR.UTF-8. 

I tried to use RealVnc, TinyVnc or the default viewer of unraid and can't do an '@' (Alt-gr + 0). I tried others, only Alt-gr + 9 works to display ^. All others (2->0) don't works. 
Is Someone has the solution to this problem ? 

[Napryc]

Hi,

 

I have the same issue after I've upgraded to 6.12.6, and had to rollback to 6.12.4 to have it working properly!

I suspect the latest qemu update from 6.12.5 to be the cause of the issue, as I get "no scancode found" errors in the logs:

2023-12-18T11:23:41.712890Z qemu-system-x86_64: warning: no scancode found for keysym 65107
2023-12-18T11:23:41.836811Z qemu-system-x86_64: warning: no scancode found for keysym 65107
2023-12-18T11:23:43.053309Z qemu-system-x86_64: warning: no scancode found for keysym 35
2023-12-18T11:23:43.189724Z qemu-system-x86_64: warning: no scancode found for keysym 35
2023-12-18T11:23:44.908544Z qemu-system-x86_64: warning: no scancode found for keysym 123
2023-12-18T11:23:45.068083Z qemu-system-x86_64: warning: no scancode found for keysym 123

 

Edited December 18, 2023 by Napryc

[jaquanor]

Ignore everything with strikethrough below. I leave it in case it's useful to someone in the future, but it's not the answer.

 

Using TigerVNC, almost everything works out of the box, both on Windows and Linux versions, both on 6.12.4 and both on 6.12.6. Almost, because AltGr does not, unless I edit the XML of the VM and remove the keymap="es" parameter. From:

 

<graphics type='vnc' port='-1' autoport='yes' websocket='-1' listen='0.0.0.0' keymap='es'>
      <listen type='address' address='0.0.0.0'/>
</graphics>

 

To:

 

<graphics type='vnc' port='-1' autoport='yes' websocket='-1' listen='0.0.0.0'>
      <listen type='address' address='0.0.0.0'/>
</graphics>

 

This is so qemu does not send the -k=language parameter.

 

Or, if you prefer to use Virt-Manager, in "Display VNC", choose Keymap "auto", which leaves the dropdown blank and removes the option in the XML.

 

After doing that, AltGr does not work in the noVNC console, but with TigerVNC I have a cross platform tool that works.

 

Similar issue here on a Spanish keyboard, luckily I found this thread after the nth Google search.

 

I downgraded to 6.12.4 and the warnings are gone, but the problem is still there. I have no idea when this problem started, as I was using RDP until a few days ago.

 

Before downgrading, when I pressed "AltGr" then "2" to type an "@" symbol, it printed nothing; now it just prints the "2". But if I press "2" then "AltGr", it sometimes prints "@", sometimes "2", which is an annoying workaround.

 

Tested on OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and Windows 10 VMs. RealVNC, TightVNC, and the built-in NoVNC web view as clients.

EDIT: After downgrading to 6.12.4, I used another computer to connect to the VMs, this time Linux. Using Remmina, every key works just fine. Using the VM console (VNC), most of them do. After that, I upgraded Unraid, keys were broken again, even using Linux/Remmina.

 

Now use this workaround at your own risk. Using 7-zip, I extracted the Spanish keymap from unRAIDServer-6.12.4-x86_64.zip/bzfirmware/share/qemu/keymaps/es and I copied it to Unraid /usr/share/qemu/keymaps/es, which gave me the behavior of the downgrade, while being on 6.12.6. So my problem is neither Unraid itself, nor the updated qemu executable, it's just the keymap file.

Edited December 25, 2023 by jaquanor

[Napryc]

I can confirm, jaquanor solution works perfectly fine and, in my case, both with TigerVNC and noVNC!