[I doubt my google juice here is enough to make this show up for anyone’s searches but what the hell, I’ll document it here anyway.]

For some reason, the vnc servers in lucid seem broken. vnc4server suffers from bug 556147, for which I created a fix for, but even with that, it seems to treat the Super key (usually mapped to the Windows key) as always on, which triggers a bunch of shortcuts and makes it useless to actually do anything in. tightvnc4server has completely garbled input and crashed after about 5 seconds of typing (bug 556222). Sigh.

Thus I thought I’d give google’s neatx another try. It installs from the launchpad PPA just fine, but the only client I can seem to find included in the ubuntu archive is qtnx, and trying to get it work with neatx would cause it to appear to just hang. The secret is that qtnx only supports version 3.0.0 of the nx protocol, whereas neatx defaults to 3.3.0 support. But if you edit /etc/neatx.conf and tell it to use

nx-protocol-version = 3.0.0

then qtnx works just fine with it. Well, until the next upload of neatx or qtnx, when surely they’ll break again.

Update:

And it seems that either the nx clients I’ve tried or the neatx server doesn’t want to pass along right-ctrl to windows in the session… which works really poorly with virtualbox, as right-ctrl is the default “escape from the guest” key. Argh!

It also looks like the Super key may be an interaction issue between Xvnc4 and gnome-session, as running blackbox inside of vnc doesn’t seem to have the same issue. But it may just be that there are no hotkey mappings that use the Super key in my blackbox setup. Super!