Skrrp's Android Blog

Nothing major new to report. While I was downloading and extracting a large source archive Android was becoming sluggish and throwing up a lot of Force Close/Wait dialogs for standard services.

I kept hitting Wait but suddenly the Nexus rebooted, going to its shiny graphical X intro. Obviously my VNC died as the wireless rebooted but as soon as it was back up I could re-connect and my session was still live.

For anyone playing along at home, my xstartup currently reads:

#!/bin/sh
unset SESSION_MANAGER
gnome-wm &
gnome-panel &
gnome-settings-daemon &
nautilus --no-default-window &
gnome-volume-manager &

It’s not pretty, but it works.

The bug seems to be with the way that Gnome interfaces with the VNC server. There are a lot of different suggestions over the net to fix it. I have found one that works for me, but I will be trying the vnc4server one at some point.

Hugues Fournier posted a reply to Scrambled Keys in feisty ubuntu desktop which saves a working good keymap and then runs it in the Gnome session.

To do this you need to VNC in to your LXDE environment and run the command:

xmodmap -pke -display :1 > ~/xmodmap.map ( if your VNC display is :1 )

Then create a shell script in your filesystem containing:

#!/bin/bash
cat ~/xmodmap.map | xmodmap -

and chmod u+x it.

This is where I differ from Hughes’ instructions. You need to run this script while within the Gnome environment. For now, I have managed to use mouse control to edit the Menu. You can browse to the script and then enter anything as a name (you can tidy this later). Run the script from the menu and test. I will be looking at ways to auto-boot it later.

Since I realised that I am now mainly working over a VNC link from a computer and not the device itself, I can push the resolution, especially under LXDE.

I have re-configured my .bashrc to run at 1024×768. Performance is still pretty good and I’m not noticing many slowdowns from the change.