Arrow keys not working in VMWare Server 2.0 Guest

I recently had to do a install of VMWare server with 4 guest operating systems and once I got it all going I found that the arrow keys were not working. On some hosts they were mapped to control or shift and on the other hosts they just did not work. After a little searching I found a simple solution. Below I outline how to fix this small issue.

First of all make sure all you Virtual Machines are shut down and you are logged out of the VMware console.

You need to locate the home directory of which ever user you are running the server under and then:

cd /home/$user/.vmware

Where $user is the name of your user, for me it was /home/vmware/.vmware

Once you get in there you need to issue the command:

ls -la

And look for a file called config. If the file is present then open it in a file editor and remove everything and replace it with the following code:

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

If there is no file called config just create one and add the preceding code.

This will tell VMWare server how to map the keys on start up and should correct the problem.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 2:05 PM and is filed under Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.