PCMCIA and USB keyboard conflict
 

Hello,
I'm running FC5 on an old tablet PC with only one PCMCIA slot and one USB slot.

I used a newer laptop to install the base system onto the hard drive, and got my PCMCIA wireless card working. My plan was to put the hard drive into the target system and then use the PCMCIA slot to get an internet connection (so I could use the RPM manager to add more software), and the usb port for my keyboard. However, when I plug both the USB and the PCMCIA in at the same time, the keyboard starts typing double letters (i.e. if I push "a", "aa" shows up. If I hit backspace, it backspaces twice, and if I hit enter it does two carriage returns. Typing "root" at the login prompt gets me "rroooott" which obviously ins't a valid login!) Also, if I unplug the USB and plug it back in, it doesn't reconnect (I can't type anything).

Without the PCMCIA card, the keyboard works flawlessly. I can even unplug and replug without any problems.

Can anyone think of what the problem might be? I'm guessing it has to do with using a different hardware setup from when I installed. Have any advice as to where I should start looking?

-Irving

Found a sloppy fix that worked:

kbdrate -r 30 -d 500

Sets the delay for repeats to 500 ms, stopping the second letter from registering. It doesn't work perfect. After setting the delay to 500, and before the PCMCIA card was in, I could type just like usual. After I put in the PCMCIA card, I could type single letters, but I could see the performance was degraded (if I didn't type really slowly, letters would be dropped, and occasionally I will still get a doubled letter).

I was running X on this machine a while back and it didn't have problems with the doubled letters (while the shell did) so I guess I'll just have to make do until I can get X installed. Of course if anyone has any more info, I'd appreciate it.

try putting this into your lilo/grub file
append="yenta_socket=0x140,11"

what this should do is assign the yenta_socket module the memory address 140, and the irq 11

That worked beautifully, thanks!

Well, it seems to work sporadicly. One moment it was working great, and the next time I rebooted I was back to double letters. Is there somewhere I can look to see if the yenta setting was set correctly once the system is up and running?