Strange keyboard problem

English Hardware
1

I’m not even sure how to categorize this or where to start looking for solutions.

Every so often my keyboard starts to “choke up”. I have to press a key several times for it to be recognized. Sometimes it is never recognized. Other times I press a key and the character shows up several times.

It seems something is interfering with the signal between the keyboard and the computer. I’ve experienced this on different keyboards from different manufacturers both wired and wireless. Presently, I’m using a wireless Logitech keyboard/mouse combo. The mouse is fine; only the keyboard has problems. Other keyboards have been wired IBM and Dell, again displaying the same behavior.

What should I look at to try to resolve this. I’m using 10.3.

2

Every so often I gently vacuum my keyboard to remove anything that has dropped between the keys. Have you tried that?

3

Not a bad idea but, this keyboard is brand new. There hasn’t been much opportunity for crumbs and dust to accumulate.

4

I take it both wired and wireless are connecting into a USb port? Have
you tried switching which port it’s plugged into with the one the mouse
is in?

Andrew C Taubman
Novell Support Forums Volunteer SysOp
http://forums.novell.com/
(Sorry, support is not provided via e-mail)

Opinions expressed above are not
necessarily those of Novell Inc.

5

The mouse and keyboard use the same USB receiver. I have moved it from one port to another. This has provided temporary relief. Eventually, the problem crops back up.

6

This morning I have the same sort of thing, but in 11.0 64bit. I was thinking it was a motherboard problem. Last week my USB mouse died, so I swapped to the mouse socket, and since then OK until this morning when the keyboard was all over the place, in spite of several cold reboots and failsafe mode. This was plugged into old style keyboard socket.

I have gone back to the USB mouse and it is fine (must be the Lazarus model). Swapped keyboards and now everything is going again.

Now it might be a co-incidence, and it might be my hardware, but thought I would post this just in case a few more cases turn up.

Steve

7

I’m actually experiencing something similar… but with the keyboard. A wireless… which suddenly fails to recognize the Shift key… or the Control key… very odd. Still investigating, as both times, had VMWare running. Looking to make sure that that isn’t the culprit. Although it still may be, as the problem did not start until afte Workstation was installed. 64 bit 11.0 on a quad core with 8gb of ram.

8

Similar issues have been showing up on opensuse 11.0. You could do a search on USB 2.0 ont his forum and you will find several posts where the keyboard is lagging or choking and all external USB drives are either not working or working at a very slow rate. Try using a memory stick on the same port and see what results you get, it might be the same issue. For now you could try plugging it in into a 1.X USB.

9

I have the following problem.

System: Suse 11.0
Desktop: KDE4
Hardware: HP 6715b
Peripherals: one external USB disk connected
Keyboard: standard keyboard of laptop (no USB or Bluetooth thing)
Frequency: about once per month
Description: keyboard is ineffective, but the mouse works.
Triggering action: unknown

Sometimes is looks that that I lose the keyboard; charcters do not appear on the screen , but the mouse remains effective. Usually I have fixed the problem with a reboot:

Fn+Alt+SysRq+ (reisub)

So, clearly the characters are received by the kernel and reacted upon.

Today I got another hint to what is going on. I “lost” the keyboard while editing a file with vi.

I tried to enter keystrokes to no effect. While keeping a key pressed for some time, I noted that some keystrokes seem to pass through.

Entering :q! proved impossible, because it was not possible to hold the key for the prices amount to enter one single character. Instead ZZ was effective as any n x Z will do the right thing.

It was not possible to enter a command line correctly as maybe just 1 / 50 characters got through.

With the mouse I was able to start shut down some application (firefox, etc) to no effect on the keyboard problem.

Using the mouse I finally found a top-like process display (no idea which one, as I do not use GUI programs much). However, I proceeded to kill processes in order to find a likely culprit. Finally I killed “plasma”; the screen got white, then I got back the GUI login and the keyboard worked and I could login and work normally.

Still, I do not know which process was eating my keyboard input, but some part of the KDE4 is highly suspect.

Best Regards, Peter Hoegland

10

I have vmware 1.07 running with opensuse 11 and gnome, some times my applications crash when trying to type something in the keyboard.

What i do to restart my keyboard is to go to the gnome control panel and to add a new keyboard layout or to delete one already exists

11

Yes! Switching keyboard layout in kde worked like a charm too.
:wink:
opensuse 11
kde 4.0.4