I was a beta tester for VMware Fusion. Fusion is a quality product, as I've come to expect from VMware. Unfortunately, the beta is over and a dialog box popped up when I tried to run it the other day. "The long wait is over!" Yeah, I've been waiting with bated breath for my beta to stop working until I fork over $40. You read my mind!

$60 ($40 after the current promotion) is the most affordable virtualization option for OS X right now, and in my opinion the most technically superior to boot. But I'm still a cheapskate, so I decided to use VMware Server on Linux over NX instead. NX is indistinguishable from magic. It works great, with one problem: the keyboard mapping in the virtual machine is completely skewampus.

In googling for the answer, I found a few people who had trouble with a key here or a key there. No, I had a completely unusable keyboard. e was the backspace key, backspace was a comma, escape was a letter, and everything else in between was equally unreasonable.

So I tried it over ssh (btw, it works a lot faster if you use ssh -Y instead of ssh -X), and it worked fine. So the gauntlet was down.

After some stabbing in the dark, reading, more stabbing in the dark, more reading, finally understanding, and one last stab in the dark, I got it to work. The theory is in this article. In short, VMware tries to map key codes to emulated PC scan codes (v-codes). If it can't do that, it maps keysym codes to v-codes. The former is apparently foolproof but isn't always an option. The problem here is that VMware thinks it will work, but it won't (probably because Apple's X11 isn't XFree86). So we simply need to put this in ~/.vmware/config:

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true