CentOS 7.6 1810 Vs. VirtualBox : Bug With Keyboard Layout Selection

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Hi,

I’m currently working on my next Linux book, which will be an elementary course about CentOS administration. I’m using VirtualBox for all the installer screenshots.

Since CentOS has recently been upgraded to version 7.6, I thought I
might as well base all book references on this version. So I downloaded the 7.6 1810 minimal ISO and started a fresh installation in VirtualBox.

I’m using a Swiss French keyboard layout (ch-fr or fr_CH-latin1), so one of the first things I do in the installer is replace the default French AZERTY keyboard (since I use the french language) by a swiss french QWERTZ layout.

Now when I reach this dialog in the installer and try do define my new layout, the slider in the selection window doesn’t appear, and clicking on any of the first layouts doesn’t do anything, so I’m basically stuck there.

I’m running OpenSUSE Leap 15.0 KDE on my workstation, so I tried the same thing with the previous CentOS 7.5 1804 minimal ISO, and the keyboard selection dialog works perfectly.

So my intuition would tell me that there’s a nasty bug in the CentOS 7.6
installer. Maybe it went unnoticed, since most folks stick to the default keyboard layout selected in their language.

Any suggestions ?

Cheers,

Niki
—
Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

9 thoughts on - CentOS 7.6 1810 Vs. VirtualBox : Bug With Keyboard Layout Selection

  • Le 04/01/2019 à 09:14, Akemi Yagi a écrit :

    OK, thanks for the clarification. Looks like this is it.

    And I’m glad to begin chapter 2 of my Introduction To Linux with something like “Well, folks, unfortunately you can’t select a custom keyboard layout in VirtualBox because the enterprise class Linux we talked about in chapter 1 has a bug in the kernel so for now the default keyboard layout will have to be sufficient.

    :o)

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

  • I suppose this shows you how little Red Hat cares about using VirtualBox (product by their competition).

    If I were running a VM on a linux system, I’d probably use KVM/qemu/libvirt. I’m sure that was exhaustively tested.

  • Le 04/01/2019 à 14:42, Jonathan Billings a écrit :

    This is what I normally use.

    My only use for VirtualBox is making screenshots of the installer, and sometimes for a quick test, because it’s easy to make a VM clone in a single click.

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

  • After some thought, it makes sense to use VirtualBox for teaching, since many people will probably start testing Linux using VirtualBox on Windows or macOS. Too bad the kernel bugs will prevent CentOS
    7.6.1810 from being useful there.

  • You guys are overreacting. :)

    The bug was in a patch applied to the upstream (kernel.org) kernel version 4.17. Therefore any distribution running this kernel was affected — including Fedora and SuSE. Red Hat backports upstream patches and this particular one was one of them.

    By the way, there is a nicely written article about VirtualBox at RH:

    https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/hello-world/#virtualbox

    along with other VM technologies.

    Akemi

  • Le 04/01/2019 à 15:55, Jonathan Billings a écrit :

    It’s not that bad a problem. It only causes a problem with the installer when folks use a different keyboard layout than the default one. So the workaround is to use the default keyboard layout during installation, and then define a custom keyboard after the initial reboot using loadkeys and localectl, if folks need this (which is rare).

    As for the rest, I’m only running it in multi-user.target mode for my Linux trainings. On the desktop, I’m running OpenSUSE Leap with KDE, and most of my students either have Windows 10 or Mac OS, with the odd Kubuntu or Linux Mint exception.

    Cheers,

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

  • It makes sense to use CentOS on top of VirtualBox.

    In fact I deliver a “Software-in-a-box” package consisting of a CentOS
    installation on top of VirtualBox for my 1. semester students in software development.

    The package includes all the necessary software for the courses 2 years ahead.

    This removes most of my support problems keeping the Eclipse C/C++
    environment stable on Windows and Mac, which I do not know very much and therefore does not offer support on.

    |<

  • I was able to change my keyboard layout by using the keyboard to navigate the widgets (mouse does not work).