Isn’t there some way to say “never go into a window” for appliance mode on IGEL OS?


I’m still running into an issue where our Horizon session in 10.06.110 running in appliance mode gets “popped out” and shows up as a window when somebody hits ctrl-alt-escape or sometimes it happens if a window is maximized in the session such as powerpoint or a youtube video in a chrome or firefox.

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I’ve been all over the registry and already in the user interface hot key area but that doesn’t seem to help. Isn’t there some way to say “never go into a window” for appliance mode? When the session gets popped out, the users sometimes minimize the screen and that makes it look like the session has crashed to them. Attached is a screenshot


First,@member, there’re 2 modes, horizon can be in: inside or outside the remote session. You switch modes by pressing and releasing CTRL-ALT (this combo can also be found in vsphere and virtual box).

Now, when you press escape inside the session, the session has to handle the keypress and all is good. In outside mode, however, VMware some time ago decided to interpret escape while in fullscreen like e.g. modern browsers do: i.e. it switches from fullscreen to windowed mode.

Horizon itself does’nt know about a thing as an appliace mode, so it doesn’t care, that we can’t have windowed mode in this use case.

Another way to switch to outside session mode is pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL. Per default this combo shows up a dialog (with 3 options :send combo to session, disconnect or ignore).

But your still in outside mode until you click into the session (given that you did not chose disconnect), so any escape key press before you do the click will leave fullscreen mode.

You can however choose a different CTRL-ALT-DEL handling, by disabling the dialog and send the the Combo direct to the desktop. For the simple CTRL-ALT combo, there is AFIK no option.


Thanks for the info. I’m not sure why all of a sudden the past few months are users here keep running into this. I’ve tried doing CTRL-ALT to get back into inside mode but that doesn’t seem to work for me. The problem is once the window gets popped out of the session, the botton toolbar in Windows is cut over. Once in outside mode, is there some key stroke to maximize the session?


To clarify: inside session mode means Horizon has the keyboard/mouse grabbed and all user input is sent to the remote session (except CTRL-ALT). It does not mean fullscreen or maximized.

To get from outside to inside, you eihter click into the session or press and release CTRL-ALT (the mouse cursor very subtly changes shape in the process).

The pickle is once you popped out of fullscreen, only the vmware toolbar would get you back to fullscreen again. But in appliance mode the vmware toolbar is not shown because we don’t want the user to switch modes in the first place.


ouch… so there’s really no work around if we want to stay in Appliance mode and we do have to stay in appliance mode. We tried other sessions but it caused a lot of other problems for our users.


Back-in-office now. Sorry for delay. Could now test a work-around for the ESC-button-puts-session-out-of-fullscreen-issue:

You could add a custom application with an associated Hotkey, in this case the escape key. The custom application simply consists of a special xdotool command.

That way the horizon client does not get to process the escape key when it’s in _outside of session mode_.

Instead, the custom command puts the client back to _inside session mode_ by sending it an artificial mouse click.

Mind that it’s not recommened to a reassign the escape key when not in _appliance mode._

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