Keyboard madness with an Ubuntu guest

[Ruarl]

Hi,

I have had a good thorough look around on this problem, and can find nothing, so I'm asking here.

I have a Ubuntu 12.04 guest running on Virtualbox 4.1.18, on a mac running 10.7.4. The problem is with the keyboard. The settings in Ubuntu are correct. Ubuntu will even show me an image of what each key does, which is the same as the keyboard I'm typing with. But when I try to type anything that isn't a letter, I get weird replacements. For example, the key which does ' and " gets me the grave and umlaut additions. Alt-3 for # gives me a tiny super-script 3, alt-2 gives wee super-script 2. A lot of keys seem to work ok. Just not the ones for C programming, which is what I want to do. I can't find the # anywhere.

Oh, and I just figured out that alt is getting through correctly, as it causes the menu underlines to come on in some gnome apps.

Any suggestions?

[mpack]

Go into keyboard settings for your guest, and select the correct keyboard map (or the closest you can get, given that your host is a Mac).

[Ruarl]

Like I said in my initial post, the settings in ubuntu are correct. Ubuntu will helpfully show a graphic of the keyboard, which corresponds exactly to my keyboard. It will also colour every key to indicate that you've pressed it, and these all appear to map correctly. Still, when I type in a text editor, I get the incorrect characters as described in the first post.

[mpack]

Like I said in my initial post, the settings in ubuntu are correct.

Your symptoms say otherwise. I can't comment on the veracity of the graphical tool you mention. For all I know it doesn't use the assigned map.

[Ruarl]

Obviously I tried other keyboard maps. This one is the closest I found. It's called UK English (Macintosh International), which is the closest match in terms of name of keyboard map. As I try other keyboard maps with names which describe my keyboard less well (I tried UK English (Macintosh) and English (Macintosh)) I get worse and worse keyboard mapping, with fewer and fewer keys mapped correctly.

I haven't tested all of the keymaps, that's true. However, I'm not sure how to proceed in searching the dozens (hundreds?) of keymaps available, when none of them describe my keyboard at all, and of the ones which could describe my keyboard, I have found the closest match.

Thinking about it, the graphical tool I mention is more correct than the response of the OS. It displays the correct symbols on every key, and illuminates the correct key when I press it. So it would appear that, in fact, the keymap for UK English (Macintosh International) in Ubuntu 12.04 uses the incorrect graphic. Further, my keyboard needs a new keymap which corresponds to the graphic used by the graphical tool for UK English (Macintosh International).

It would appear that the veracity of the graphical tool and the underlying keyboard mapping database are equally questionable.