x11vnc under Ubuntu 16.10 - wrong keyboard mapping when accessing from Windows 7

Question

sorry, still quite a new-be with Ubuntu and thus may not see the obvious.

I have installed Ubuntu 16.04LTS as well as 16.10 from scratch on a small Intel machine with a German keyboard attached. The system language is set to English, but the keyboard to standard German. When working on the system directly all is normal.

I have installed x11vnc as server on the box and access it from a Windows 7 notebook with a standard German keyboard using VNC Viewer 5.3.2.

The access generally works, but I noticed that some special characters are not being submitted correctly. The main problems I have are with @ and |.

I have tried setting special options on the server side such as -xkb, -remap DEAD,
-add_keysyms, -noadd_keysyms, but none is the solution. One of them - forgot which after all changes - gave me the wanted characters, but suddenly I could not get the ! anymore.

Edit: Just tested other VNC clients under Windows (VNC Viewer 6.0.0, TightVNC Viewer 2.8.5) with the same results. Must be an issue between Windows and Ubuntu as such.

What I am doing wrong? Thanks!

Solution

I solved the exact same problem for my Ubuntu 16.04LTS server that I connect to via VNC by using setxkbmap xx. (Adjust xx to your language. So in your case 'de')

This, however resets on reboot so you need to go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications and add a new startup programm. You can choose whatever you like for name and comment. In the command section type in setxkbmap xx (again replace xx with your language code).

The command is now executed at startup and will set your keylayout.

Comments

[Martin Hennings]

Under 14.04 I succeeded by running sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration and setting it to '105 key (intl)' and 'German' (which meant accepting the preselected defaults). Can you try if that works under Ubuntu 16, too?

[Martin Hennings]

Seems to be neccessary after every reboot...