Dell Inspiron 1100 and keyboard problems
 

Hello everyone. I was so happy to get my new Dell Inspiron 1100 the other day, and even more happy to take off Windows and start with Linux Mandrake. I was reading the Dell forums and one person said 9.1 handled the built-in broadcom adapter, so I went to 9.1 (I've use 9.0 on my desktop).

Everything went smoothly and everything was recognized including the ehternet card. I then rebooted and tried to login in X, it wouldn't accept my password. I booted to the text login (localhost kogin:) and tried there (after other things). An interesting thing happened, my keys are messed up. Linux decided to truncate the keyboard and have a num pad where the letters are so my username stampede96 was entered as sta0*ede and my password as well is not correct.

I wondering if it was something off about 9.1, so I took that off and went to 9.0. It does the same thing. Does anyone have any idea how to get my keyboard back?

Thanks.

this might be a really quick fix, but the laptops at my school, if numlock is on, it does what it sounds like your computer is doing. I dunno give it a shot, and get back to me :D

Wow
 

Four installs to fix this problem and all I had to do is turn off num lock...thanks Quik! There's no problem now!

Dells (and many other laptops) also go into this state when an external keyboard is attached. A good thing to watch for.

no problem stampede96. I didn't know what was going on with my laptop at school when I had numlock on. Actually, no one did. Then about 2 weeks later, we figured it out :P

I'm glad people are hashing out details with this laptop... I just got knoppix installed last night, and the keyboard was working in all it's glory when I booted from CD, but now that I've got it all on my computers HD, some of the keys don't map properly. Most notably...

the slash key (as we all know has at least a *little* importance to linux users!) produces a '-' shift+/ produces a "_" ................


never mind, I think I found out what the issue is... I'm logging into KDE, and Knoppix defaults a "de" or german setting down in the lower right of the taskbar near the clock, clicking that to english fixed it...

Well, thinking out loud hopefully helpd someone!