To have a working keyboard layout in VM, I have to change keyboard layout in host as well

[Alex52155]

Version: TrueNAS-12.0-U8.1
Regarding the host, everything is working fine, be it GUI or SSH.
My usual keyboard layout is german. There are no issues. (in case you are wondering what the difference to US keyboard ist: z and y are switched and also pretty much every special character that exist)

But when working with a VM (both with noVNC inside the browser and with a different VNC Client), the VM apparently 'expects' an english keyboard layout.
I have to change host layout to english keyboard, then inside the VM I can select and use a keyboard layout of my choice, be it english or german layout.

If I don't switch the host keyboard layout to english, the layout is completely mangled. Multiple keys are not recognized at all, no matter what keyboard layout is selected in the VM OS settings.
Example: The keys next to L (; and ' in english layout, ö and ä in german layout) are not recognized. I checked this with xev - no keystroke.

This isn't a huge problem, but I don't think it's intentional.
Any ideas? Is this a known issue?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

If your guest OS is Windows, your experience will be much better if you use RDP instead of VNC. For a Linux guest and the command line, use SSH or a serial console.

 

[Alex52155]

Thanks. For Ubuntu, are there any special packages and configuration needed for RDP?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I don't know, honestly. All my Linux VMs don't run a graphical desktop - all servers. So I use SSH exclusively. The RDP recommendation was for Windows. What's your use case for a graphical environment Linux on TrueNAS?

 

[Alex52155]

Currentely just playing around and testing. SSH does not have the described issue.