The more I use Linux, the more I love it...but I have noticed some quirks, especially with the keyboard. I am multibooted with 2 MS OS's and RHEL4 and Fedora4. I have noticed that even though I have the boot-up numlock setting enabled in the bios, Linux never recognizes it with any distro or any machine I've ever used. Does anybody have a setting that they change in the software maybe, to ensure that numlock kicks on right off the bat? I use the num pad all the time and every time I log into linux I get hieroglyphics the first time I use it....then I backspace 20 times, enable numlock, and proceed. Anybody got a cure...its surprisingly hard to break the habit of NOT checking the numlock light before using the numpad...and I shouldn't have to do that anyways.

Also, with RHEL4 (but not Fedora)...I had to increase the typematic delay in the bios from 250 Msec to 750 Msec to prevent the whole OS from acting like it was on CRANK...literally!! I'm talking ten tabs instead of one when you hit control+T in firefox, 5 new prompts in a terminal instead of one after hitting enter for the previous command, and when I typed: itttt woooooulld llllllllloook liiiiiiikeeeeeee ttttttttthis. The backspace key did the same thing, so sometimes you'd hit it to take care of one extra letter and it'd erase three or four previous words and you'd have to start over with the RHHHHELLLLL onnnnnnn ssssspeeddd gammmmme. Thank God the bios typematic delay fixed the problem, or else I wouldn't have even been able to use RHEL4, after 2 minutes of typing I was fully ready to go postal.

Crud.

I spoke too soon I guess about the "5 letters per keypress" issue. It did it a little more just a minute ago when I was in another forum. I restarted and upped the typematic delay to 1000Msec. I hope that takes care of it for good because my bios settings dont go any higher than that. Anybody else seen this before?

Changing the typematic delay to 1000 did not fully take care of the problem either. The symptoms happen less often, but still occur regularly. For example, when I was working on a lab example from my RHA material I needed to su to root for something and it took 8 tries just to su to root!! On 4 of the first 7 tries, it registered multiple "enters" for one keypress of the enter button...so I obviously got a failed attempt since it was searching for a blank password. On the other 3 attempts it registered multiple keys while typing in the password. It was an extreme pain in the rear.

I am thinking that it cant just be a bios issue because my typematic rate is way slower than what happens when its being weird. With these error symptoms I might get 15 "t" characters when trying to begin the word "the"...but they appear instantly...if I intentionally create 15 "t" characters it takes a good amount of time because I have the typematic delay all the way up and I also have the typematic rate pretty slow.

I would have tried a new keyboard by now but I have the same keyboards for my rigs, so I'll have to get one elsewhere.

I dont know if anybody really cares about the subject since I had no replies the first time, but shorty after posting the previous entry in this thread...I figured out the culprit. It had nothing to do with the keyboard or the typematic rate of the keyboard...it was from using the SMP kernel. I have a dual-core opteron, but it seems that on my system I cannot boot to an SMP kernel without the problem. Everything is golden with the single threaded kernel. If anybody has seen this before and knows whats going on, please let me know.