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I followed this article and I have the desktop running on Ubuntu on an EC2 instance and I can connect to it from TightVNC. When I try to use Terminal, when I type certain characters, they seems to get lost. For example, I can type passw but the when I try to type d that character doesn't appear. If I then press Enter, the Terminal window minimizes. I can't type the character d at all. All other letters & numbers are fine. How can I fix this?

BTW, I'm using Bash in Terminal. Everything works when I SSH into the instance using PuTTY. It's only when I use a Terminal instance from TightVNC that this problem occurs.

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2 Answers

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Not exactly and answer but VNC is a mess. I suggest you migrate to NX. Its faster and uses ssh by default. I use FreeNX on Ubuntu on EC2.

edit: I was able to replicate this bug.

Possible solutions:

http://linuxexpresso.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/howto-ubuntu-vnc-encoding-server/

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10608/d-key-on-vnc-viewer-minimises-all-windows

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I tried a couple of tutorials (help.ubuntu.com/community/FreeNX, help.ubuntu.com/community/NomachineNX, aws-musings.com/…, ) to get NX installed on my Ubuntu instance but no luck. If you have any pointers, let me know. – Sajee May 9 '11 at 19:56
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Can you type an upper-case "D"? Are you using Bash? Try this:

Type the following, but don't press Enter:

binD '"D":self-insert'

Now move your cursor to each capital "D" and press Alt-l (that's lower-case ell) or Esc l to change the "D" to "d". Once you've done both, press Ctrl-j.

Now type this command and press Ctrl-j:

bind '"\C-m": accept-line'

Next, check your ~/.inputrc file for invalid key bindings (they won't have the bind command or the outermost quotes). You should also check your shell startup files for invalid bind commands.

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I was able to enter binD '"D":self-insert' with the lowercase d. But I couldn't enter the second command because lower case d still doesn't work. When I tried to type the d in bind, the Terminal window would minimize. So it looks like the first bind command didn't work. Yes I'm using Bash. – Sajee Mar 17 '11 at 13:04
@Sajee: Try xmodmap -pke | less and see if there's anything odd about "d" or "Return". You may have to use the Alt-l trick to get the "d" in "xmodmap" and you may need to use Ctrl-j to enter the command. It may also work better to redirect the output to a file so you can come back and view it in an SSH session. – Dennis Williamson Mar 17 '11 at 15:05
@Dennis: the results of the xmodmap shows this for d: "keycode 40 = d D" and for Return: "keycode 36 = Return". Does this look right? – Sajee Mar 17 '11 at 17:25
@Sajee: It's the same for me (at least through SSH and PuTTY). Do you get the same results for both VNC and PuTTY? There's somewhere you've got a keymapping out of whack and at the moment I'm drawing a blank where else to look. Try running xev and press some keys and see what it shows. – Dennis Williamson Mar 17 '11 at 17:31
@Dennis: pressing d in xev causes the Terminal and xev windows to mimimize. – Sajee Mar 17 '11 at 17:52
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