Reinventing the wheel. Badly

So, I had x11vnc all nice and tested with the TightVNC viewer on Linux and RealVNC on Windows but I get a bug report. User couldn't log on. -unixpw was displaying Username: user was entering username, but pressing Enter wouldn't move the the Password field.

Looking at /var/log/x11vnc.log I see a bunch of:

12/10/2010 15:17:39 unixpw_keystroke: bad keysym4: 0xff8d

Looking in /usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h, I see that 0xff8d is XK_KP_Enter, that is, the Enter key to the right of most number pads. And not XK_Return, the Enter key that's just to the right of the alphabet.

Looking at x11vnc's source code, I see that

1. x11vnc/unixpw.c only checks for XK_Return and XK_Linefeed. But what's more;
   
2. reimplements the huge bloody-effing-inputting-text-with-editing wheel;
   
3. x11vnc's -remap function doesn't happen in the code path that leads to unixpw_keystroke, so is bloody useless for this problem.
   

So the solution is to use TightVNC viewer on Windows. I already know that TightVNC is the better viewer for Linux. So now that's 2 out of 3.

Of course, the other solution would be to patch x11vnc. But I already have my time fully commited to reading Irregular Webcomic!

Third point being why was it working for my test setup but not in the field? Well, I had Windows Server 2003 as a VMware Server guest, via the VMware server console running on Linux. So something somewhere was remapping something somehow. "It is always possible to add another layer of indirection."