I use VNC connections as part of my regular daily routine, and I ran into another bug a few days ago, so I figured I’d post a summary of the current bugs that are currently afflicting me, and the workarounds for them.

First is a really interesting bug where the less-than-sign turns into a greater-than-sign.  Really.  I’m not joking. The comma and period work fine, it’s just the less-than-sign.  The public bugid for this is 14729. The workaround is to run xmodmap when you start your VNC session (I put it in ~/.vnc/xstartup).

xmodmap -e 'keycode 94 = comma less'

The second bug is that the server crashes whenever you turn OFF the capslock key.  The public bug for this one is 14397. The workaround I found for that is the following:

vncserver ... -RemapKeys 0xffe5->0x00

In other words, you try to disable the capslock key, and the result is a capslock key that works correctly.  I have no idea what the implementation is doing.

I’m using a Mac client these days as a desktop, so I’d be interested in hearing from anyone using windows VNC clients to see if they’ve hit these same bugs or not.  Of course, I do live on the bleeding edge of OpenSolaris.  The last few biweekly dev releases have been internal-only, but I think both of these bugs are in public OpenSolaris releases.