Keyboard freezes

Twice now since I installed openSUSE 11.0 a few days ago, my keyboard has frozen up completely and the only way I could advance was to use the power-off button to shut down completely and reboot. (I thought one of the arguments for Linux was supposed to be that it didn’t do things like the blue screen of death.)

Anyway, what could be causing this?
Is there anything to do other than forcibly power down when it happens?

I have this installed as dual boot (with XP) on Lenovo 3000 N100.

Thanks.

If your caps lock light was flashing, it’s probably a bad wireless driver. Do you use wireless? If not disable it.

At what point does the keyboard freeze? Before/After loading the kernel, Before/After the xserver starts, while starting initial services? Does the same occur if you use the failsafe boot? Did you use the livecd to install?

If you can use the keyboard during boot and kernel loading, I suspect a problem with the graphics driver for your system. You may want to take a look at xorg.conf.

The second time it froze was when I was scrolling through a web page (NYTimes) on Firefox. If I remember correctly, that was the case the first time also.

PS–where is xorg.conf located?

Thanks.

Try a different keyboard.

Lenovo 3000 N100 is a laptop, so it’s a bit hard to try a different keyboard.

Well, that’s true. I didn’t notice the make/model info. :slight_smile:

The problem could be the xorg driver, firefox, or corruption of some binary. If the keyboard freezes only when firefox is used, try uninstalling firefox, do a package update for your system, then reinstall firefox. You could also try using opera or konqueror instead. I did have an issue with firefox when the wrong version of xulrunner got installed during an update.

If the keyboard freezes using other programs your issue is something else, though updating everything may fix that also.

Lenovo 3000 N100 is a laptop, so it’s a bit hard to try a different keyboard.

Not if you have a usb keyboard handy :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I had a quick look on google and some models of he laptop have nvidia geforce graphics, I’ve had the same as you’re experiencing happen before using an nvidia card until the drivers were installed

What graphics card does yours have?

If it’s the nvidia have you installed the nvidia drivers?

The graphics card is an Intel 945 GM.

The freeze happened again tonight. I think I happened to move on the touch pad at the same time I was using an up or down arrow. Don’t know if that means a bug (abuse of me) or if it means abuse by me.

I’ve heard of a keystroke method to escape a frozen desktop and get to a terminal window, though I can’t remember what it was. But in this case the keyboard seems to go completely dead. Do I have any option in such a case other than a forced power-down?

Thanks.

This sounds like what happens to me. The desktop is loaded all the way to a terminal opening, I bump the mouse stick and the caps-lock comes on and the keyboard freezes. No response to anything. So, poweroff is the only answer. A reboot fixes it. Only happened since updating to kde 4.2.