missing keystrokes with Mdk 10 on Toshiba laptop
 

Hello,

Some time ago I upgraded from Mandrake 9.1 to 10.0 on my Toshiba 2450 laptop. However, I've run into a number of problems with 10.0 that didn't exist with 9.x. One of them is that the keyboard doesn't work well; it bounces keys (which I found a fix for), but more annoyingly it misses keystrokes. It seems to be correlated with CPU and/or network activity; if the machine is busy it sometimes requires 4, 5 tries to get it to catch a keystroke. When writing text blindly often whole strings are missing, and entering a password can be a very frustrating exercise.

Does anyone know what the cause is, and how to fix it? What surprises me is that this was never a problem under Mdk 9.x (neither the bouncing nor the missing keystrokes). Could this be kernel related (currently running 2.6.3-15mdk, with 9.x I was running a 2.4 kernel)? I have not tried to downgrade the kernel so far, hoping there is another way to fix it...

Thanks!

Just as a followup to my previous post: I found a moment to install the 2.4.25-7mdk kernel that's also included w/Mdk 10, but the missing keystrokes problem remains. Given that it didn't occur when I was running Mdk 9.1 with a 2.4.x kernel a few months ago, I assume it is not related to the 2.6 kernel. Does anybody have an idea where to start looking?

Thanks!

Where to start looking
 

I had the same problem on my Toshiba 2450 laptop with Fedora Core 2 and Debian unstable when running a 2.6 kernel. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but it's related to the XKEYBOARD option in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (might be called XF86Config if Mandrake is still using the old filename). Look for a staza "InputDevice" for your keyboard, and make sure you have an uncommented entry: Option "XkbDisable"

When I did that, I restarted X by logging out and logging back in, and my keyboard worked just fine. Hope it helps for you.

Thanks for the tip... but I was already using the XkbDisable option. That was what fixed my bouncing keys problem, but it unfortunately did not take care of the 'missing' keypresses...

Another thing to try:
 

Okay, try this: it's what I had to do when I ran debian unstable on my laptop.

Re-enable the xkb extensions, and then restart X. Then try running the script at this location
http://www.janerob.com/rob/ts5100/40custom-rtm (ref from http://www.janerob.com/rob/ts5100/index.shtml#kbdmouse)

Hope that helps for you... shame that just killing the xkb extensions don't solve the problem in mandrake like they do on FC2. Oh well.

Guys I have the same problem. I have a Toshiba Satellite 2450 with Fedora Core 2, latest Kernel. 2.6, fully updated w/ yum. When I use the laptop keyboard, it misses key strokes and like he said, it misses it mostly when theres lots of activity within the CPU. Nothing I've done fixed it, including disabling XKB... and that script didn't run properly.... Could someone help me out?