I was playing with a new VPS few days ago, and while at it I found myself unable to connect via ssh any more. So I went to the VNC console to fix the network config, but while I could enter the password I wasn’t then able to type the slash (/) character, so I couldn’t access any file outside /root. I’m using an Italian keyboard layout, all the special characters above the numbers were working except for £ (never used) and /.

In addition to that, for some reason my VNC client (RealVNC on Mac) wouldn’t allow me to use copy/paste features, so I was cut off.

I was typing an email to their support when I thought: and if it’s just a matter of keyboard layout? (like for the VMware console)

So I switched to the en-US keyboard, and I was immediately able to type any character I wished, given I could remember its position on the American keyboard (and luckily I mostly do).