There is a add-on technology to X or VNC called NX by an Italian company called NoMachine. It's quite useful as it speeds up working on remote desktops via slow network connections (i.e. DSL pipes) substantially.
The libraries that implement NX are released under GPLv2 by that company. A server wrapping up the libraries' functionality is available as closed source from NoMachine or as a free product (GPLv2 again) by Fabian Franz, called FreeNX.
FreeNX itself is amazing as it is written in BASH (with a few helper functions in C). It's also able to mend some of the shortcomings of the NX architecture. E.g. stock NX requires a technical user called "nx" to able to ssh into the NX server with a public/private keypair. FreeNX can work around that for more secure set-ups.
One issue I bumped into quite regularly with Linux clients and Linux hosts from different distributions/localisations is that the keymaps are not compatible. This usually results in the ALTGr key not usable, so German keyboard users can't enter a pipe ("|"), tilde ("~") or a backslash ("\") character. Also the up and down keys are usually resulting in weird characters being pasted to the shell. Now all of that makes using a shell/terminal prompt quite interesting.
Thanks!! After a bit of editing (removing everything above 225) it also worked a lot better on my Ubuntu (client) -> OpenSolaris (server) connection.
/magvar
Ubuntu Karmic 9.10: After I did as instructed, my server displays in xterm [number 1-256] Keycode: command not found. xterm is uselas now.
Sounds like you're trying to run .Xmodmap directly in bash. That is wrong. You have to run
xmodmap .Xmodmap(=xmodmap is the executable you need to run, .Xmodmap is the argument). Make sure you have that or a functional equivalent in .bashrc.Try editing your .Xmodmap and delete the lines that appear as error. When you delete all error codes, it will works.
That worked for my as in my laptop I had keys for volume, bright, wlan and bluetooth, but in my remote server I didn't, so I had to delete those keys before xmodmad wanted to load .Xmodmap file.
Best regards and thank you for the tip!
Unfortunately, this doesnt work for me. I did xmodmap -pke >clientxmodmap on the client Then i did xmodmap -pke >serverxmodmap on the server (via nx of course) then i copied clientxmodmap on the server and, on the server, i issued: diff serverxmodmap clientxmodmap they are exactly the same. I use evdev as keyboard driver on both sides, and them are exactly the same archlinux installation.
I've been able to fix other keyboard issues by typing, remotely on the server, via nx:
xmodmap -e "keycode 98=Up"
xmodmap -e "keycode 104=Down"
xmodmap -e "keycode 100=Left"
xmodmap -e "keycode 102=Right"
xmodmap -e "keycode 99=Page_Up"
xmodmap -e "keycode 105=Page_Down"
xmodmap -e "keycode 106=Insert"
xmodmap -e "keycode 97=Home"
xmodmap -e "keycode 103=End"
xmodmap -e "keycode 107=Delete"
xmodmap -e "keycode 109=Control_R"
xmodmap -e "keycode 113=Alt_R"
and now the keys are correctly mapped, i can check via xev utility, but
"alt_r doesn't seems to receive any keyup event, nor work as a modifier key :("