I installed vmware on another machine today to play around with a few things. Roughly the same setup as with my last set of keyboard woes but different problems this time.\r\n\r\nThe arrow keys didn\\\’t work as they should do at all. The keyboard mappings were obviously messed up as when I hit the up arrow in a terminal in the VM it decided that I wanted to take a screen shot. After checking the keyboard shortcuts defined in Gnome this showed that it had been somehow mapped to be the delete key.

A bit of googling and I found the following solution to the arrow key dilemma :

echo xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = t > ~/.vmware/config
This made the arrow keys function as expected (after a reboot of vmware). Back on to some real work now!

Sometimes when I run Vmware under linux I have noticed that it manages to stop my Ctrl/Alt/Shift keys from working on the OS running Vmware. This has proven to be a real pain at times but the following solution works a treat for getting them working again. All that is needed is to run the following app in a terminal and it restores the functionality of all keys :

setxkbmap