How to send F2, F8, F9, F12 to a VNC Remote PC from Mac OS X

When recently using [Intel Active Management Technology](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-active-management-technology.html) (AMT) I was remotely connected via the RealVNC client, but was having trouble sending keystrokes like F2 to enter the BIOS, F12 to select a startup device, or F8 to access the Windows startup menu.

This setup is complicated for a few reasons – first I’m using a Mac keyboard. Secondly, OS X remaps the function keys to do things like dashboard, expose, brightness, and volume by default.

After a little searching and trial and error, I found that I can use the free utility included with Mac OS X – `AppleScript Editor.app` – to send keycodes to the VNC connection. Here’s the code for the applescript you can use to send the `F12` key:

tell application “VNC Viewer”
activate
tell application “System Events” to key code 111
end tell

This is what it should look like in the editor:

To send key combos, like holding down alt and pressing F4, the syntax would be something like this:

tell application “System Events” to key code 118 using {command down}

We use `command` instead of `alt` because that is how Real VNC Viewer translates the “alt” key for a remote windows system by default.

To send other keyboard F-keys to the remote Windows machine, use the table below to find the appropriate key – make sure to reference the “Mac” column even if the remote machine is a Windows box.

###What about JAVA?

But what happens if you are running a java applet for a KVM console? How do you *tell java* to do a keycode?

To tell java to send F12 try this:

tell application “System Events” to set frontmost of process “java” to true
tell application “System Events”
tell process “java”
key code 111
end tell
end tell

If you haven’t seen Intel’s AMT with KVM control – check it out. They say, “with out-of-band management capabilities, including Keyboard-Video-Mouse (KVM) Remote Control,3 Intel AMT allows IT to remotely remediate and recover systems after OS failures. Out-of-band alerting and event logging also help to reduce downtime,” and basically it just makes it really easy to connect to a computer to control it – even access the BIOS etc before it even boots into windows.

Related Posts:

• Where can I download rdpclip for Windows XP?
• Hide “You can search from here with Google” in Chromium
• ActivePerl Flags
• windows system32 host location
• Connect to a Shared Folder with VirtualBox and Windows XP