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Fedora (with Gnome) and VMWare Workstation 6.5 = keyboard trouble

| Categories: Linux, Technical, Windows | Tags: , , , , 2 Comments ↓

This didn’t happen for me with previous versions of Fedora or previous version of VMWare Workstation, but it seems to have happened to others at varying times.  This problem came about for me when I upgraded to Fedora 10 (I had already been using VMWare Workstation 6.5 with no issues).

I have Windows XP running in a VM to deal with the “windows-only” aspects of my daily job, and after the Fedora 10 upgrade, a handful of keys no longer worked properly.  These problem keys were:

  • insert
  • home
  • page up
  • delete
  • end
  • page down
  • all of the arrow keys (left, right, up, down) – It should be noted that the left arrow was acting like the “alt” key and the down arrow was acting like the “windows” key.

The solution, as found on this page, is easily summarized like this:

  1. Create (if it does not yet exist) ~/.vmware/config
  2. In that file, enter the following:

    3. xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
    xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
    xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
    xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
    xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
    xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
    xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
    xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
    xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
    xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
    xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
    xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
    xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
    xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
    xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
    xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
    xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
    xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
    xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Save the file and start VMWare Workstation to get the full functionality of the keyboard back.

    2 Comments

    1. stephen01

      This is how I did it with fedora10 and vmware 6.5.1 with a windows 2000 guest:

      close workstation (or player)
      open terminal

      su
      cd /usr/lib/vmware/
      ls

      … if “config” shows up as one of the files, then

      vi config

      there should be a page of lines saying stuff like “tag.help = ”
      (If you don’t see them or the file did not exist before, this may not be the correct location to do this.)

      Add this line at end:

      xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true

      save and close and reopen workstation.
      It gives a big info message about the new keymap, press OK and continue.

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