So I tried to use this neat feature of VMWare to export a running virtual-machine via VNC to a remote desktop. Works great, especially if your virtual-machine (for whatever reason) is not connected to the network, and thus you cannot use remote-desktop or something similar.

But since I’m a german-keyboard-layout user, I wanted to take advantage of my keyboard-layout (hell, I just wanted to use ;!!). But I had to figure out, that this doesn’t seem to work. So first I blamed UltraVNC and so I switch to some ancient version of the good old AT&T VNC 🙂 but nothing changed.

But after some time I got to it … you need to tweak the *.vmx file of your virtual-machine. This is some setting, that is not available through the GUI … just add:

RemoteDisplay.vnc.keyMap = "<xx>"

where can be any language-code whose keyboard-layout it available in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\vnckeymap.