How to retain guest focus in VMware and still use CTRL-ALT.

My needs are modest, straightforward, and oft-thwarted.

Today's hope was two hours--two hours, I say!--of straightforward, unencumbered forward progress. Forward progress, in this case, ending in a decent hour-long training presentation with a few performance numbers thrown in. Like I say, modest.

Instead, I spent nearly an hour monkeying around with VMware's VCenter (it says 4.0, but I am guessing this is actually the 4.1 vintage, which comes with ESXi 4.1), which for reasons inscrutable, no longer seems to be able to pass the CTRL-ALT key combination to a guest operating system, instead taking the key sequence as a universal focus release. I think this behavior changed when I installed the 4.1 Vcenter client, but haven't spent the extra HOUR it might take to verify that. My old trick, pressing ALT-CTRL instead, no longer works. Someone suggested (in 2007) CTRL-ALT-space, letting up the space key, then hitting the function key....nope. No dice. Function keys don't work either.

KVM's Virt-Manager, while a ludicrous toy in nearly all respects when compared to Vcenter, at least has the power tool "send CTRL-ALT-F2, dammit" menu option.

So, you know what the workaround is? SHIFT-CTRL-ALT-F2.

That allows you to switch from the GDM screen to another pseudo console where you can actually log in as root.

But it doesn't work to get you back.

Sigh.