On a new installation of SUSE 11.1 (Gnome) which logs me in automatically, whenever I restart X and have to log in again, it won’t authenticate me because the password is garbled. I checked by trying to login as someone else (to see the keyboard output rather than the asterisks) and discovered that half the keys produce unexpected characters.
In normal use, ie in the terminal when automatically logged in, the keyboard works fine.
Any ideas? It’s a bit tiresome to have to do a full reboot instead of a quick CTRL-DEL-BSPx2.
Bump - can’t believe I’m the only one experiencing this. It’s a new SUSE installation, haven’t mucked about with xorg.conf, and it’s totally reproducible: everything’s fine until I log out of X and try to get back in - “unable to authenticate” because keyboard types garbage password.
I know it’s obvious, but sometimes it’s easy to overlook the obvious…
Have you checked you have the right keyboard map? It should say at the bootloader menu, and again when you select a user to log on, but before you type the password.
The two differ, evidently (e.g. mine is US during boot, but switches correctly to UK by the time I’ve got into X, never causing a problem), but should both be roughly right - garbled text sounds like it could be a completely differing language.
Try changing it in YaST Keyboard Layout - possibly deselecting any unrequired additional layouts that may have inadvertently been checked.
It’s worth noting that in Gnome you can right click on a panel, ‘Add to panel…’, then select keyboard indicator. Presumably you can do something similar in KDE.
Thanks for making me think about keyboard maps - checked in Yast and no problem but I observed what’s happening - ie which characters are produced - and discovered that for some reason, doing ALT_CTRL_BSPACE activates NumLock! Disabling it manually before entering the password solves the problem - now all I have to figure out is why Numlock gets activated in the first place!
Bizarre, but interesting! 
Glad to be of small help, and I hope you find a complete solution.
Have you checked your BIOS? Some computers (particularly laptops) have low-level keyboard macros and combinations that mimic certain keys, especially if they’re physically missing the key because of space constraints. Worth checking that you aren’t sending a ‘num-lock’ signal without realising.
Yes it is bizarre but I’m not sure how the BIOS can come into it. Everything’s fine after a full reboot, and logging out and back into X doesn’t involve BIOS.
The keyboard I’m using is a temporary one as I’m setting up the computer for someone else. So I’ll probably let it rest until the final stage with the actual keyboard (a Logitech wireless which may raise other issues, depending on kernel support) until I revisit this one…
It was pretty speculative… 
But I’m pretty sure I’ve come across BIOSes that map certain keyboard combinations to absent keys. My thought was that maybe the BIOS is designed to work with keyboards without Num-Lock keys, and pressing Control Alt Backspace was causing it to send a Num-Lock signal to the OS, or perhaps even flip internal modes and send future keypresses in a garbled state.
Maybe try Control Backspace and Alt Backspace and see if either flip Num-Lock?
But your line of thought about kernel drivers for the keyboard is probably more likely.
It’s not a laptop but a desktop with a modern ASUS BIOS. A single ALT_CTRL_BCKSP doesn’t do it, only a repeated one, so it might be something to do with X after all. It’s just that this is such a minor irritant (now that I’ve worked out how to deal with it) that I can’t be bothered to dig further until the final setup - and who knows, on past Linux form, some update might have solved the problem by then…
Just wanted to add: thanks for your input. Your mention of keyboard maps made me look into exactly what characters were produced by the keypresses, which then led me to Numlock.
Lesson: others will take a fresh, lateral look at problems, and even if they don’t come up with ready-made solutions, they’ll often prod you in the right directions. So muchas gracias senor.
Lesson wholeheartedly agreed with.
And you’re welcome - good luck with the system set-up.
having problem loging in… after i changed my password to more letters, i accidentally hit enter… it said truncated. i could not log in again…please help.
If it’s your user account, reboot, and at the grub screen press the number ‘3’. It will appear in the kernel parameters box, hit return - this loads suse in runlevel 3.
Log in as root, then type ‘passwd [username]’ and you can set the password for any user. Type ‘/sbin/shutdown -r now’ to reset and boot normally.
If it’s your root account, google ‘reset root password opensuse’ - it isn’t especially tricky, as far as I know, but I’ve never actually had to do it.