I am running KDE 3.2 on a Debian linux box and am seeing some strange behavior with the Caps Lock button. If I have Caps Lock engaged and hit the "a" key I get a capital "S" as an output; if I hit the "s" key I get a capital "D". This happens regardless of which user is logged in or which program I'm running. Basically the Caps Lock key somehow uses the key directly adjacent to the right of the intended key.

If I exit out to the console then this behavior disappears. If I log into the machine remotely I see none of this nonsense. This leads me to believe that it is a situation within KDE.

Has anyone seen this behavior and/or do you have any suggestions how I may remedy this?

sounds kind of weird. what's the default keyboard that's selected? check the task tray for the US flag (if you want US keyboard) or change to what kb you want. and/or see what's entered for kb in XFree86Config.

I have the exact same XF86Config-4 file on identical machines (within a cluster) but I only see this behavior for this particular machine.

The relevant passage in the XF86Config-4 file is:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "keyboard"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

does it happen in all your KDE apps, or just the konsole?

It happens in all KDE apps.

(Oh, and I DID try a different keyboard. I've made bonehead mistakes like that before...)

That's weird.

You could try reinstalling the keymaps. They should be in /lib/kbd/keymaps, or maybe /usr/share/kbd/keymaps.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/kbd/?branch_id=5023

Is keymaps a different package or is it contained in kbd? If I apt-get kbd then Debian wants to remove base-config and console-tools. I don't think that's a good idea, but I could be wrong.