Keyboard failure in GUI
 

Hey everybody, I have a problem with my GUI, which is KDE. Last night everything was fine. This morning, I woke up to find a popup KDE window asking if I wanted to enable "slow keys". I hit cancel and moved on. I'm guessing one of the cats decided the laptop was a good place to take a nap. Glad I wasn't signed in as root!

In any case, within KDE the keyboard doesn't work at all. I can't type letters, numbers, shortcut keys, alt-tab, keyboard shortcuts within evolution, nothing. It isn't the hardware, because I can shutdown KDE from the start menu, and it works fine at the prompt outside of X.

This search yielded the most hopeful reply here, but it quickly degenerates into name calling, and the guy with the problem solved it by reinstalling, which I am not willing to do.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...topped+working

Sorry, I know nothing about how a keyboard could completely stop working within X. I look forward to any replies that you can give me!

Peace,
JimBass

Have you try restarting the computer, maybe that will work. Log in as root and see if just a problem with your user account. Have you try alt+f1, f2, etc??

Just a thought: Have you tried "removing", your keyboard, and then telling KDE you have (for example) a "United Kingdom - GB" keyboard (most keys will work fine). Then try removing the UK Keyboard and re-adding the US one?

In kubuntu, this is all under K - System Settings - Regional & Accessibility - keyboard layout.

Sorry ctrl+alt+f1 or f2,...

Restarting the computer will make no difference, this is not windows. Stopping the X server and restarting it could make a difference, and I have done that several times, to no avail. Also, there is nothing wrong with the account itself, as I wrote in the original post, outside of X everything is fine.

I hadn't thought of trying that. I did just switch the keyboard to G.B. English, stop KDE, restart it, and I still have no output from typing in KDE. It is a deeper level that language settings apparently.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, please keep them coming.

Peace,
JimBass

Is there something amiss in /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc ?

See this post:
http://dot.kde.org/998062776/9983291...56/1108813654/

I had never installed kdm, I always boot to a prompt, login in, configure the wireless, then startx. As a result, I had no kdmrc file to edit. I installed kdm, checked, and the line in question, ServerVTs=-7, was already in [General]. I restarted the whole machine, kdm started, and allowed me to type in my username and password, which I took as a good sign.

Nope. The minute I got past kdm into full KDE, the keyboard again wasn't functioning. It signed me in not 10 seconds prior to this, but not once I get into the desktop.

Also, whatever was done had to be done as a regular user. My user pass is a full 20+ char alpha-numeric-capital-symbolic pass. My cats have some skills, but not skills on that level of typing.

Thanks again!

Peace,
JimBass

Sheesh, I wouldn't tolerate this with win (which I haven't updated since win98, and don't use except for testing hardware), and certainly not with linux: I login, the wireless connection is automatically configured on my laptop, and the same for my wired PC - I login to the GUI and it all works. I never have to configure anything, unless I'm instaling new hardware or messing for the fun of it. I only go to the terminal to reconfigure something.
This might be excessive, but it's up to you!

Get that cat back at the keyboard, and force it to retrace its steps on the keyboard. Offer the choice of sardines or drowning. Then un-do those keypresses!
Because the cat was working in a GUI, you are unlikey to learn much from history.

Seriously though:

The wretched cat pressed some keys. [Mental note for the future: cat-proof your laptop].
Now something is seriously wrong, and you do not know what. You are understandably not keen to reinstall.

Is this lack of keyboard input a user or global / OS fault?

Please login to a terminal (with ctl-alt-F1) before you start KDE. Then try renaming your /home/me/.kde to something different, like /home/me/.kde.noKBD.
Then login to KDE. The .kde directory will be re-created with sensible defaults. You will have lost your KDE customisations, but the keyboard might work.

If it does not then it is a system fault, not a user fault, and we need to be looking outside your home directory to find and fix the problem.

I saved things myself about 5 minutes before I saw this latest post. I forgot that I had been making daily backups of everything in my home folder through backupppc/rsyncd. I was able to grab the entire /home/jim/.kde folder from may backup yesterday, erase the current, and dump it into place. Now all is well.

I elect to boot without a graphical environment starting. I use this laptop for work, and there are plenty of times where I need to play IP games, or work for a long time without power on rooftops and such. DHCP is great, but at work I'm usually in places where for security or practicality, there is no wireless and no dhcp server. I get nearly 4 hours of use at CLI with a battery, but no better than 3 hours if I'm in the GUI. For my purposes/desires not automatically starting works better. I realize I'm in the minority on that, but I run enough headless stuff that I'm usually much more comfortable at the CLI than looking at pictures.

Thanks to everybody for the help in any case.

Peace,
JimBass