I've had this issue on both my laptop and my desktop. When I try to log into Ubuntu using a console and I press the caps button, I still get lowercase letters.

Example:
No caps lock
With caps lock
With the caps lock key I would have expected KYLE. This continues once I log in. I can't use capital letters unless I press the shift key until I run a 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup'. Then, even if I keep everything the same, I can use my caps lock key and everything works as expected. However, when I reboot my computer, my caps lock key doesn't work. I only have this problem in Ubuntu. I have read the ubuntuforums and Googled and searched these forums and have only found one other person that has my problems and they have completely different hardware. Also, people who have the same hardware as me have not posted that they have this problem. Anyone have any suggestions on what I could try to get this annoying console problem resolved?

Thanks,

Kyle

EDIT: I left out the problem. Read it again and see. Thanks!

I wanted to try this on my desktop Slackware machine, but I long since pried the caps lock key off its keyboard and threw that sucker down the street as far as I could throw it.

So I went to my laptop, which also runs Slackware. I found a situation similar to what I read you saying, but not identical.

This is not a bug. Believe it or not, it's a feature.

Once upon a time, model 33 Teletypes coexisted with model 35 Teletypes, both connected to the same time-sharing computer. User names were usually lower case, and passwords were typically lower case also. But model 33 Teletypes don't have lower case. So when the login program found that a user entered his user name in all upper case, it would set a bit so that for this session, all upper case input would be read internally as lower case, but echoed as upper case; further, all output would be translated to upper case.

So I did this experiment on my laptop. (This might not work the same for you.) I went to a logical console which had not been used since I had booted the laptop. (It was tty6.) I didn't press the caps lock key, but I held down the shift key as I entered the user name. The user name was echoed as upper case, naturally.

From then on, I did not press or touch the shift key (or the caps lock key either). I entered the password (which contains lower case letters, but no upper case letters). The login succeeded. My shell prompt, which includes my user name, was emitted with that user name in all upper case. I typed the "ls" command, and that command was echoed on the command line as "LS". And all my filenames appeared with lower case letters translated to upper case. I did a "cat" of a file that contains lots of lower case letters, and they all came out upper case.

Again, this is not a bug. You'll thank the guardians of tradition should you ever be caught with only a model 33 Teletype available.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the reply wjevans! I had never realized that TTY stood for teletype before. I have read the wikipedia article on them and am amazed! Unfortunately, that was not my issue.

I think my problem is has to do with a bug in the console-setup program. It is not that everything appears in caps but are treated as lowercase. Instead the caps lock key doesn't produce uppercase characters. Since I had a password that consisted of a series of capital letters and numbers, I used the caps lock key to enter my password. When I entered a teletype, I noticed that it would never accept my password. Then, I noticed that if I left the caps lock key engaged, I would still only get lowercase letters.

I have changed my password so that I no longer need the caps lock key to log in and I think I am going to create an alias that will allow me to reset console-setup really easily. Again, thanks for your reply. It has ended up being very educational.

Sincerely,
Kyle

This is Ubuntu bug 84156; sorry for the inconvenience. I found the cause over the weekend and fixed it, so it should be fixed in Ubuntu 7.10. In Ubuntu 7.04, the best workarounds (aside from going and editing init scripts by hand) are either to run 'sudo setupcon' from a console after each boot, or to disable the boot splash screen by removing 'splash' from the kernel command line arguments.