startx no longer automatic and keyboard stopped working!
 

I did quite a lot of installing, going through some serious dependency hell, yesterday so goodness knows what I have done to my system, but today when I booted it (Mandriva 2007), it did not go automatically to KDE.

If I invoke KDE by using startx, KDE boots, but the keyboard no longer works! Mouse does just fine though.

Anyone know what might have done this or what information I should be looking at to try track this down?

Many thanks.

Edit. It's not this slow key issue I have found others with on the forum!

How does its behaviour deviate from `working' behaviour? What is working behaviour?

Pay a visit to http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html and http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html; I expect that you will ask questions that are easier to answer if you do.

It simply doesn't work at all any more. Works from the command line, but when you go to KDE, it just doesn't work. Mouse works just fine though.

Repeating what I don't understand won't make me understand it.

I would guess that what you're saying is that when you press the keyboard, nothing happens: you can't use kwin keyboard shortcuts to access the K menu, you can't navigate in the K menu, you can't enter text into kwrite, you can't enter text into the text areas on linuxquestions.org when viewing it in _any_ browser when running KDE (for some value of KDE). However, you can press C-M-F[1-6] to switch out of X (and of course C-M-F7 to switch back in) and the other keys hardwired into X (C-M-KP_{Plus,Minus,Star,Slash} and C-M-Backspace).

Is this correct?

Try using gnome, xfce and enlightenment; try not using desktop environments--that is, run just a window manager such as fluxbox, openbox, blackbox, wmaker, evilwm, waimea, aewm, aewm++, 9wm, larswm, oroborus, twm, metacity, kwin, ion, stumpwm, sawfish, windowlab, tinywm, olwm, olvwm, fvwm, lwm, jwm, ctwm (try a handful of these, not all of them); does you keyboard work with any of those? Try running xfree instead of xorg; does that work? Try running "setxkbmap dvorak" (or your favorite keyboard layout) when starting X. Try "running" your favorite keyboard layout with xmodmap. Look in kcontrol--do the keyboard settings look sane? On debian, the gnome-applets-data package contains /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.dvorak, perhaps you can find a similar xmodmap file on your own to try out.

Try it all out; report back your findings.

Please save us the work of finding that thread (by linking to it); otherwise we're less likely to read it.

At http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa04/tech/, you can find a talk about debugging and sex therapy. It might have some useful information which aids you in debugging.

I don't mean to be rude, especially to someone who's trying to help me, but none of that would work. The keyboard did nothing. Full stop. No menu swapping, nothing whatsoever.(Sorry, that sounds sarcastic, it's not supposed to.)

In the end I just reinstalled Mandriva from scratch, it was by far the quickest way to do it. I wouldn't know how to try any of the other things you suggested.

Thanks anyway. Not sure what you're on about with debugging and sex therapy. Maybe you were being sarcastic. :(

About the debugging and sex therapy: if you listen to the talk, you will find out that I'm not being sarcastic. Not that I want to make you listen to it, just to let you know where the "evidence" is.

I really don't understand what you mean about evidence. I get the feeling you're accusing me of not writing in plain English, but maybe I just don't follow what you're saying.