lifebsideben

Why, oh why, am I compelled to click the shiny button?

I ran the Ubuntu update manager and it says a new distribution upgrade is available, to 7.04. I go read the release notes, hmm, sounds good, nothing earth-shattering but let’s go for it. Now, understand that I interact with my Ubuntu server, in order of importance:

1. via Samba to the Mac
2. via VNC for Azureus, misc. updates, etc.
3. via ssh and http (cvs, subversion, plain old ssh, web development, etc.)

These core features have never suffered problems during an update/upgrade, since my first install of Ubuntu 5. Sure, lots of other stuff has gone wrong, and the fact that I do upgrades over VNC is probably not helping things, either. But when it decided it didn’t know how to mount my RAID array, or the boot disk for that matter, or made an incompatible kernel the default, or trashed my network (or X) settings, it was never that big a deal… a little reading maybe, hook up a monitor (this server is normally headless), and tweak a bit, reboot, happiness.

But apparently, ’twas not to be the case for the 7.04 upgrade. As usual, I upgraded over VNC. It seemed to just “finish” without the normal message eventually, hmm, well, ok let’s reboot. Looks like new stuff, cool. Run upgrade manager again… claims an incomplete upgrade, run again. OK, wow, it actually started from where it “left off”, just a few more packages, and 5 minutes later, it was happy, rebooted, shiny, yay! Or so I thought.

I fired up my tightvnc server and connected to it from the Mac, with the excellent Chicken of the VNC client. Looks fine as usual… but hey.. gibberish when I type! Huh? The keyboard mapping is all wonky, or similar. ‘a’ types ‘a’, but most keys do NOT correspond to what is coming back. Really weird. OK, well, let’s change the “keyboard layout” setting in the Gnome preferences… no go… the selected “Generic” one is the only one available to choose. Head scratching. Configuring X, let alone Gnome, is not my idea of fun, nor something I know much about.

Maybe it’s all like that… try it from the console, hmm, keyboard works fine, although it does give me a fairly weird dialog about “The X system keyboard settings differ from your current GNOME keyboard settings.” It then goes on to show the two detected settings (of course, not telling you which set is from X, and which from Gnome), and then allows you to pick one or the other. I tried picking both, and it didn’t seem to matter… when using the console. OK, so let’s try vnc without Gnome… set it to just start x-window-manager instead of Gnome. Hey, keyboard works fine! Start Gnome up from within x-window-manager… it starts, but keyboard is hosed again. Grrrr. It definitely seems that Gnome is the issue, and I’m sure it was upgraded in 7.04. Bah.

Searching around, I find people having other problems with 7.04 and other builds of vnc, and someone who is seeing the same weird dialog box I am (but of course, his keyboard works fine). And an old post from the VNC list (that no one seems to have ever responded to) from a guy with the exact same problem. Nothing conclusive on the ‘net from a lot of searching and poking around.

Now, I did notice some complaints about not being able to load “XKB” when I loaded Gnome from within the other WM. I don’t know if that’s the issue, nor how to resolve it (the XKB libs seem to be pretty obviously in the library path), but that seems like a possibility.

So, strangely, I’m actually stumped. I spent about 45 minutes on this and gave up. I’d really, really like to fix this, but need someone with much more GNOME-Fu than I possess. Anyone got suggestions? Force new keyboard layouts into Gnome via VNC? Convince VNC to pass in the right thing when it starts up? Change something on the VNC client? ???