Hi fellow Slackers,

I have a smallish issue here on my notebook, and I have
no idea how to even describe it accurately. It first
happened when I was entering a sed command, with a back-reference
to the scnd set of parenthesis. \2 reset X, or so I
though ... I did some experimenting, and lo and behold,
I could reproduce the behaviour even on the xdm login
screen, when I typed in my sed expression as the name.
Not every time, not accurately, but maybe 3 out of 10
times I can reset X by pressing 2 on the numeric row
in a quick succession with other keys, and the \ I at
first thought was required to trigger the behaviour
is not necessary at all.

Nothing in the X-log, nothing in ~/.xsession-errors (how
could there if it even happens in xdm?) ...

I'm annoyed, and as X is quite sizable and spawns a truckload
of processes I'm highly reluctant to try and reproduce the
behaviour under the control of strace (mind you, since it
seems to be "speed" related it maybe wouldn't even occur
under strace ;}).

Has anyone got any ideas what may be causing the problem,
or better yet, how to fix it? I'm running Slack64 13.0 on
a Thinkpad R500 with an Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics chipset,
can't think of anything else that might be special with this
hardware in regards to X.


Cheers,
Tink

/tongue in cheek
The problem appears to be that some twit keeps pressing loads of keys very fast and sending unintended key combinations which are confusing a busy X server when it finally gets round to looking at them. . . For you, this is a moral victory: You have passed from Novice user to intermediate. No doubt you have seen the definition of user types
Novice - Is afraid to do anything in case he presses some key that will break the computer.
Intermediate - Doesn't know what to do after he has pressed a key that broke the whole computer
The expert, of course, breaks other people's computers.
/end tongue in cheek

Have you checked logs and found nothing? Changed shell (bash to csh or the like?) Changed keyboard definition?

I obviously checked logs, thx for asking ;}

Haven't changed shells, and can't see how those should relate.
As I said - it even happens in XDM

When things make no sense, I start thinking of hardware, just like a software guy thinks of software. Two hardware ideas suggest themselves

1. Some sort of memory error.
2. Some weirdness in a Southbridge. These can be configured by programs which allow designers to 'tune out' certain errors. Some minor failure inside may allow this. This is about as exotic as a coroner finding death by spontaneous combustion, but it is possible. If it is the case, the errors will probably increase over time.

It could be software, of course.