[Fedora-xen] FYI switching VTs in guest framebuffer with virt-manager

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Tue Oct 3 01:14:13 UTC 2006


A fair number of people have wondered how to switch virtual consoles in
guest framebuffer using virt-manager. The basic problem is that all 
keystrokes need to be passed through to the guest & not interpreted by
the local host. This is a tricker problem than it sounds because while
you can grab the keyboard using XGrabKeyboard (or its GTK equiv), this
does not block VT switching. So with the recent release of 0.2.3 of
virt-manager I implemented a simple workaround.  Here is a summary of
the behaviour in virt-manager now:

 - In normal view keyboard grab is not activated - so regular window
   manager key bindings will still be processed by your local X session
   rather than the guest.

 - In fullscreen view, keyboard grab is automatically activated (and
   deactivated when switching back to normal view). So all keys will
   be processed by the guest with exception of the Ctrl+Alt+XXX combos

 - At any time 'sticky modifiers' can be activated. Press any modifier
   key 3 times in a row, and it will 'stick' on until the next non-modifier
   key is released.  So, if you want to send Ctrl+Alt+F1 to the guest,
   then you would type 'Ctrl   Ctrl   Ctrl    Alt+F1'.

I've found the time '3 quick taps of Ctrl' quickly becomes second nature
& not nearly as tedious as it sounds - switching VTs is a fairly infrequent
operation after all.  

Regards,
Dan.
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