French keyboard: many characters are not accessible

[Yannis1962]

When I heard about VMWare Fusion being better than Parallels I immediately decided to try it out, because of a major problem I have with Parallels: many characters are impossible to get:

for example, to get a brace on a French keyboard you type alt-( alt-), to get a bracket you type alt-shift-( alt-shift-), the at sign is on the upper utmost left of thekeyboard, and the shift of it is a #. None of those works with Parallels, and neither do | (vertical bar), \ (backslash) and other characters you get using alt- key combinations.

Well the problem is exactly the same with VMWare Fusion. And I didn't found any solution. It puzzles me that VMWare people claim to have localized their program into French, while more than a dozen ASCII characters can not be obtained from the keyboard!! that's pure ASCII, and I cannot get it. I cannot write a simple computer program...

I would really appreciate, and I will immediately buy VMWare Fusion, if they provide me with that product in which I can type any ASCII character, am I asking a lot?

Thanks in advance for any advice...

(I'm running the latest VMWare Fusion under French MacOS X 10.5.5, on a MacBook Pro with French keyboard)

[RvPLaN]

Hi,

I'm exactly in the same case...

Parallels and VMware have done their marketing job. As I were more confident and more used with free VMware products under Windows, I jumped and bought Fusion 2.2, running on a MacBook OSX 10.5.6 with french keyboard.

I really don't get it... Why those (not so) special characters are trapped by Fusion in a way or another?

Or, better said: why should Mac users have in mind a picture of a Windows french keyboard to type these characters? I've noticed that the right Alt key is equivalent to the Alt-Gr key. But, hey: Alt+Gr is a Windows special key to get an ASCII code. If the Mac system give the same ASCII code through another special key combination, just use it!

If you are a developper or a Linux command line user, braces, brackets, backslash and pipe are essentials. If you are just a Windows user, how do you expect to type folder paths or network paths without backslash?

I'm pretty sure that the french keyboard is not the only international keyboard with this character filtering in Fusion. Latin keyboards in general, especially with accented characters, do not have braces and brakets directly available without a special key.

We bought a Mac, we aren't responsible of the fact that Apple has its own keyboard mapping. I bought Fusion. I do not intend to bought a Windows USB keyboard to have Fusion functionning well. Fusion is a Mac product, it should respect Mac standards.

Regards.

[fplanque]

Same problem here, but I have 2 solutions:

Solution 1: first install windows on a bootcamp partition, then migrate it to a VMware virtual machine. That way, you automagically get the Apple keyboard driver installed by bootcamp.

or

Solution 2: get this keyboard map and install it in windows. Then go to regional preferences and install the new keyboard layout.

Both solutions have worked for me.

Potential Bonus Solution 3: there are easy ways to edit your key mappings in mac os x . These will let you put any character on any key under mac OS X. Now, if we can find teh same kind of tool for windows, then we can fix any key we want in a Windows virtual machine.

Francois

[RvPLaN]

Hello,

Effectively, when I did change keywords in my google search, I end up on the French Mac keyboard layout for Windows[ by Florent Pillet|http://www.florentpillet.com/]. Dated from 2004, but it works, except for keys < > and @ #, which are exchanged. So I will check your link.

I may be stubborn, but I still do not understand why it is possible to do so many great things with a VM (Desktop unity, ISO images CD mapping, USB, etc), but not adjusting the host's input

keys to match the virtual system... Shame.. Plus, in my opinion, changing the keyboard mapping in the VM may corrupt testing, if someone wants to have a "perfect" (!!!) Windows system (I mean fresh and unaltered install).

Anyway... Thanx a lot for pointing out these solutions.

Regards. Hervé.

[fplanque]

I agree that VMware should include windows keymaps for apple keyboards.

This should be part of the VMware tools you install into windows anyways. (don't you?)