To type, say, ‘@’, I have to press and hold the right Alt key (labeled
Alt-Gr), and then the number ‘2’ in the alphanumeric keyboard. Ie,
[Alt-Gr] gives us access to a third letter in some keys.
When I’m running any guest system inside vmware player, this doesn’t
work. I have no way to type ‘@’.
What I often do is save a file in the guest, imported from the host,
with the letters that I can not type in the guest, and use that for
copy-pasting the letter.
But today I’m using and Android guest, and I see no way to paste
letters, and I need to enter a login email address.
I see no way to make popup a virtual keyboard either.
Some other way to type ‘@’ that you can imagine?
Some way to make vmplayer accept alt-gr second keys mapping?
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
Needs to be tested, but in theory I’d be optimistic that you could use the shared clipboard.
Although it’s still a workaround, it wouldn’t rely on actually transferring a file into the Guest.
A shared clipboard would likely be limited using the Community VMware Tools, you’ll probably want to install the proprietary version.
> Needs to be tested, but in theory I’d be optimistic that you could use
> the shared clipboard.
No, the shared clipboard doesn’t work at all, there are no guest tools
for Android. I tried to install them, but the guest doesn’t see the
“CD”. And vmware thinks the guest is Linux, not Android, anyway.
I managed to copy paste the needed letters using a web page under Apache
on the host machine, on which I typed what I needed. Then, on the
Android guest I managed to select the text, and ctrl-c, ctrl-v actually
worked, so I do have a working workaround.
(but then the app I wanted to try fails to run for different
reasons, so dead end)
I got some suggestions to try keyboard combinations, which I’ll do
sometime later, and comment here if they succeed.
One of the ideas there (the only one that worked) is to edit
‘/etc/vmware/config’ and add this line:
xkeymap.usekeycodeMap = true
In that file, I had instead:
xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true
as a modification I did years ago when I was using the now defunct
vmware-server. Apparently it was needed to get the arrow keys working. I
got the advice from this page:
<http://radu.cotescu.com/2009/10/23/enabling-vmware-server-2-0-1-arrow-keys/>,
which now gives 404 error, so I can’t read again why it was done.
Anyway, I commented out the old line, added the new one, restarted
vmware, started a Linux guest, and the alt-gr key worked! I tried then
the Android guest, same thing. Success!
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
Glad to hear that not only does the shared clipboard seem to work, you found a proper solution to your original question.
As for “no Guest Tools for Android,” I did a quick search.
Yes, it seems that no official Tools has been released for Android, yet I wonder if installing should “just work.”
You’d of course have to start with x86Android, and not a version of Android running on another CPU, typically ARM.
If the CDROM can’t be mounted in the Android Guest, then you can mount the ISO either on the Host or in another Guest, copy the x64 gzipped Linux tools elsewhere and transfer (or copy) the file into the Android Guest.
Then follow the usual steps… Install the required dependencies which is mostly the compile tools and then try compiling.
Superficially, without any deep knowledge about Android, what I do know suggests there shouldn’t be anything that should prevent ordinary VMware Linux Tools from being installed in an x64 Android guest.
> Glad to hear that not only does the shared clipboard seem to work, you
> found a proper solution to your original question.
>
> As for “no Guest Tools for Android,” I did a quick search.
> Yes, it seems that no official Tools has been released for Android, yet
> I wonder if installing should “just work.”
>
> - You’d of course have to start with x86Android, and not a version of
> Android running on another CPU, typically ARM.
I already installed the Android guest about a year ago.
> - If the CDROM can’t be mounted in the Android Guest, then you can mount
> the ISO either on the Host or in another Guest, copy the x64 gzipped
> Linux tools elsewhere and transfer (or copy) the file into the Android
> Guest.
>
> - Then follow the usual steps… Install the required dependencies which
> is mostly the compile tools and then try compiling.
Install dependencies, in the Android guest? Build them?
No… either vmware publishes a set of guest tools directly targeted at
Android guests, or the exercise is pointless.
Guest tools have to know how to handle the display and high level tools,
such as the clipboard. A generic Linux toolset would not work. And that
would need “rooting” that Android.
Anyway… my final interest was running a certain application of my ISP,
to view movies, that they build for Windows, and Android (Mac?), but not
Linux. So I was trying if it would run in Android, virtualized. It does
— but it does not recognizes the platform and refuses to play content.
Nothing that can be done about that.
