Xephyr: keyboard mapping not working properly

Question

When I start Xephyr and LXDE session inside:

$ Xephyr :1 -screen 1920x1054 -nolisten tcp -reset -terminate
$ DISPLAY=:1 startlxde

some keys are not working properly, such as Up, PageUp, PageDown. Looking with xev, I see very funny key names:

PageUp:   Hiragana
Up:       Katakana
PageDown: Control_R
Left:     Henkan_Mode
Down:     KP_Enter
Right:    Muhenkan

Obviously, in normal LXDE session (without Xephyr), everything works normally.

One thing that is relevant here:

I am not using udev daemon on my system. (I just needed to add Option "AutoAddDevices" "Off" to /etc/X11/xorg.conf to make X work without udev.

When I turn udev back on, the keys inside Xephyr work OK. But that is not a solution for me.

How can I diagnose and fix this problem (without udev) ?

+1 Had this issue several years ago; Last time I had used Xephyr, the keyboard mapping was working properly when running in VirtualBox emulator. I didn't manage to figure out why. — , Aug 21 '16 at 16:25

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 29 '16 at 20:19

5

You can try to read the keyboard configuration of :0 with setxkbmap and to set it on :1 with xkbcomp:

setxkbmap -display :0 -print | xkbcomp - :1

answered Aug 29 '16 at 20:19

mviereck

2,377
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that works great ! You are a genius. – Martin Vegter Aug 29 '16 at 20:35

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 28 '17 at 20:18

2

An even shorter version of mviereck's suggestion:

xkbcomp :0 :1

answered Jul 28 '17 at 20:18

uli42

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when I do this, my whole Xephyr session crashes – 400 the Cat Dec 31 '19 at 08:41
Yes, mine, too. Xephyr 2:1.20.4-1 on Debian Buster. Looks like a bug. – uli42 Jan 01 '20 at 14:46

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:18

1

There's an answer to a similar problem on Superuser.

The solution is to start Xnest / Xephyr with -kb.

There's a bug in relation and it still has the status "NEW". Strange, but it may apply, though 7 years old.

Take a look at the other answers in case -kb didn't fix it.

And see this one to get an insight into the -keybd option.

edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:18

Community

1

answered Aug 21 '16 at 20:05

the `-kb` option does not exist anymore, and the new `-keybd` does not help either, when used as `Xephyr :1 -screen 1920x1054 -keybd ephyr,,,xkbmodel=pc105,xkblayout=us,xkbrules=evdev,xkboption=ctrl:nocaps -nolisten tcp -reset -terminate`. I suspect, the problem is related to the fact, that `udev` daemon did not "set" up something that `Xephyr` needs. As I said, the keyboard works OK when I boot with `udev` enabled. – Martin Vegter Aug 21 '16 at 20:35
How to pass `-kb` in firejail? – somenxavier May 27 '23 at 07:46

Xephyr: keyboard mapping not working properly

3 Answers3

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