Keyboard Freeze Variant. 11.1 KDE4

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1

I’ve seen some of the other posts of freezing keyboard, but my
experience has been slightly different from those. They claimed they
could only power off, etc. I’ve found a little more flexibility than
those, so this may or may not be related.

I am running a freshly installed 11.1 on hp dv9000 cto (custom).
Home partition is encrypted, as well as user dir.

Using the kde 4 setup (so far, haven’t tested it under gnome or kde 3x
yet).

The keyboard will randomly stop working in one application window. I
first noted it in kmail/kontact, when I would try to reply or forward an
email and attempt to edit that email.
I would close out kmail, and start over, and it would work again.

Sometimes. As I used the system more, I started noticing the same
issue under other applications, Firefox, Scribus, konsole, etc.

Just a few minutes ago, I had a more complete lockup. I could not use
any keys at all and couldn’t ALT-Tab away as I had before.

My mouse continues to work throughout all of this.
I closed (with the mouse) every open window, and still no improvement
(couldn’t get Caps Lock or num lock to light up, etc.).

I managed to click the “Lock Screen” icon. (I probably could have
clicked the Log Out option instead of course).

The password prompt to get back in to that session still had an
unresponsive keyboard.

So I clicked on start new session (switch user) from the password
prompt. Voila, with the same user, but under f8 (the old one still
running under f7), I have full keyboard again, and am posting this
message right now.

My suspicion is something with kde4, but haven’t done enough process of
elimination yet.
I see various, seemingly unrelated errors in the logs, that have
occurred even when the keyboard is working fine (claiming tuochpad out
of sync, etc. I’ve seen this in suse on this laptop since 10.x, yet
mouse always works), but I don’t see much else in the logs. Maybe
suggestions on a debug mode to enable to get more about the
keyboard/desktop lockup specifically?

I read one suggestion in the forums to remove Beagle (though I am NOT
using Reiserfs, I am using ext3, but my /home is encrypted).

Another thing I notice (though may or may not have any relation) is
that plasma uses a considerable amount of ram (around 400-500 MB), and
with two sessions, there are two plasma processes running, so that’s
almost 1GB consumed. I’m not familiar with this (new?) Plasma process, I
will take a little time to read up on it.

I also have SCIM running (for my Chinese and Russian work).
After I post this, I am going to try removing Beagle and see if that
makes any difference (after rebooting). Then I will try to remove SCIM
and see if that makes any difference.

If it still acts up, I will try downgrading to KDE3 and see if there is
any difference there.

Failing that I will try Gnome (blech) as well.

I’ll post here as I continue the process of elimination, in case
something I stumble across helps anyone else out with this issue.

Any other suggestions are of course most welcome.

Cheers!

–
kmleon

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2

Can you verify that your keyboard works normally under another OS
(perhaps the popular one from Redmond?) or a live CD? Actually, what
might be better is to see if you get the same behavior with an external
keyboard.

I had similar problems with a laptop touchpad. It would drift off
uncontrollably. I found out later (fortunately before I had spent hours
tweaking my xorg.conf) that it was physically damaged, so no tweaking
the settings would help.

–
openSUSE 11.1 x86_64; Kernel 2.6.27-9; KDE 4.2.87; Intel Core 2 Quad
Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz; 6GB DDR2 RAM; 640GB SATA HDD.

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3

This laptop quadruple boots between OpenSuse 11.1 (was running 11.0 (my
primary use OS) without this problem, but used KDE3),
OpenBSD
Windows XP SP3
Windows Vista Ultimate.
None of those have shown any similar symptoms.
Also as I noted, If is start a new session while the old (locked up
keyboard session) is still running. The new session works fine (didn’t
run it long enough to see if it eventually locked up, ran it about 15
minutes with no lock).
I now have my laptop docked, and using external keyboard as I write
this post, so we’ll see if that, or the docking station, make any
difference.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Cheers!

–
kmleon

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4

Unfortunately using the external keyboard did not diminish the issue.
Also even with SCIM not running at all the problem still occurs.

Removing Beagle has not made a difference with this ongoing
intermittent issue.

It seems to be the worst with kmail/kontact, but can occur in the
command shell windows (konsole), firefox, konqueror, scribus, or any
other window that accepts text. Interestingly, ALT-TAB usually still
works, even when I can’t type otherwise.

It will be a time-consuming process to downgrade this account (mostly
moving the email) back down to KDE 3.5 (it had taken a long time to move
it from KDE 3.5x to 4.x (mostly the email/kontact/kmail piece), to see
if it’s something with the 4.x portion.

Before I potentially spend (hopefully not waste) that much time rolling
back, does anyone have any other suggestions, something I can enable in
the kernel, logging, something somewhere that might generate some
logging of this issue?

Thanks!

–
kmleon

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5

I’m wondering if kmail is the whole cause of this problem. The problem
seems to ALWAYS occur if kmail is running. Not sure that I have observed
it occurring when it is not ( I will try to keep better track of that).
This is very frustrating. If it is kmail,anyone have any suggestions on
that end?
Kmail/Kontact Version: 4.1.3-3.11
KDE4 Version: 4.1.3-4.9

At this point it is interfering so severely with getting many things
done, I guess I have no choice but to go through and try tomove all the
email back to KDE3 and see if that resolves things (this is a PITA since
there are around 70k emails, many filters,etc. all sorted in many
subfolders).

I’ll try the rollback and report back in a few days if the problem
stops (or sooner if it recurs).

–
kmleon

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6

So of course this process of trying to remove KDE 4 is arduous. It would
normally be much easier to just run the installation new from the disc,
except that it appears that Suse ( ? ) so tightly coupled KDE 3 and 4
libraries that you can’t actually install ONLY KDE 3, without it
including much of 4. I know lots of folks say you can just switch as
needed, and that they play fine together, but considering the source of
this problem, that’s not been the case. I already tried just adding
KDE3, and then switching the user desktop to be KDE3 instead of KDE4,
but the keyboard problem showed up still.
So, I’ve (temporarily) installed GNOME.
Then I’ve been clicking through dependency hell for a while, trying to
get rid of every vestige of KDE3 or 4.
Then after a reboot (assuming I even have a usable system afterwards
(under GNOME).
I will then attempt to install only KDE3 components (with all KDE4
parts set to taboo (while trying to figure out which repositories are
slipping in KDE4 components).
We’ll see how this goes…

–
kmleon

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7

Ok, now KDE3 and 4 are completely gone. I think I’ll try fiddling around
in Gnome for a bit (I’m plenty familiar with it from my testing (and
reviews) of the Ubuntu (which doesn’t fit my needs at all)), to make
sure the keyboard issues doesn’t rear it’s ugly head under Gnome (then
it would mean a more systemic issue), before I try to add just KDE3
back.
More to come.

–
kmleon

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8

Looks like KDE (or something part of KDE) was the culprit, I suspect
KDE4 over KDE3, but not certain yet.

Now that all traces of KDE are gone, so far at least (yesterday and
today), not a single incident. This was happening several times per hour
before. I am going to incrementally add components to see if I can
narrow down which KDE-related piece it was.

First I need to find out how to stop KDE4 from showing up as an option
to install (keeps trying to force KDE4 components even when all I want
is KDE3 pieces.

Then I will install just KMAIL, specifically KDE3 version. Then Kontact
and it’s related pieces. Then a little more at a time.
If everything works with no KDE4 components, then at least we know it
is a KDE4 problem, I can use one of my other systems to test that out
and see if I can submit a specific bug report if that ends up being the
case.

I’ll keep posting updates as this progresses.

–
kmleon

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9

Though not a detailed listing of all the hoops and hassles I had to jump
through, here is an overview of some of the roadblocks I ran into when
trying to remove KDE4 to rollback to KDE3, and eventually just had to
completely remove KDE, temporarily running GNOME.

Additional Notes on roll back from kde4 to kde3x:

Fought me in trying to roll back, kept insisting that if I uninstalled
kde4-kdm, that I couldn’t install pattern:kde3_basis.

Told it to go ahead and NOT install kde3_Basis…

This meant couldn’t use patterns to install. Instead did more “manual”
option of using the “Search” and matching the kde 3 packages to
install.

This was iterative and incremental.

kdelibs4 and kdebase4 stubborn about being removed.

Attempting to remove kdebase4 wanted to force removal of kdebase3 as
well. There is far too much interlinking going on here. hmm…

Hmm, kdelibs4 removed ok, but libkde4 is noted as essential for KDE
period. Maybe not “KDE 4”?

set all KDE to “Taboo”, was only way to stop it trying to add KDE
pieces back in.

Ok. will try the following:

Install Gnome desktop (blech).

reboot, login with gnome desktop.

Run Yast package manager, completely uninstall ALL KDE’s (3 and 4).

reboot.

Logging in again (gnome).

Disable all repos except original DVD.

Install JUST KDE 3x.

Slowly enable repos, watch out for any packages that try to slip KDE4
back in.

We’ll see how this goes.

Sidenote: while trying to uninstall KDE4, kept having that annoying
keyboard issue, that is the main cause of all this hassle. Will watch to
see if it goes away after all this (hopes so, that’s pretty much the
whole point, that and the fact that KDE4 is still FAR too unreliable,
crashes, bloated, slow, and buggy. Also I don’t like it being closer to
gnome interface).

–
kmleon

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10

Just as an addendum, indeed I found the KDE35 only install option under
Other >> KDE35 during the initial install desktop selection.

I was installing it for a friend (ironically who’s worked for Microsoft
for many years), and warned her not to do the install with KDE4.

As for my update on the keyboard issue under KDE4, I have added
Kmail/Kontact/Kdepim (3x) back (still running under GNOME for now), and
no recurrence of the keyboard problem so far.

Now I am going to switch back fully (though still incrementally on the
other applications) to KDE 3x. If I do not post on here again, it means
the problem never came back under KDE3x.

I will also perform an install on my other laptop with KDE4 and see if
I can reproduce the problem, and track down the specific application(s),
to file a bug report.

If/until then.
Cheers!

–
kmleon

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