[PLUG] interesting (painful) mystery

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Sun Oct 21 15:52:21 UTC 2007


On Sat, 20 Oct 2007, Kurt Sussman wrote:

> For the last week, if I shut it down and restart it, I can't log in. The
> 't' and 'y' keys don't work, the tab key doesn't work, and I can't get
> uppercase to save my life (this is the one that prevents me from logging
> in). All other keys seem to work fine.

Kurt,

   Last week most of the right side of my workstation/server keyboard stopped
functioning. Totally dead, but it would print the ASCII ESC sequences for
some of them. The [Enter] key didn't work so I could not kill the X server
that way, nor could I using ctrl-alt-bksp. Thought the keyboard died like a
previous one (and the one on the ThinkPad) did.

   I logged in from my notebook and killed the xinit session. I tested each
key on the right side of the keyboard, row by row, and discovered that the
non-functioning ones were on the embedded number pad. Pressing the Fn key
made no difference. None of the special key lights were on: no caps lock, no
num lock, no scroll lock. But, I pressed the scroll lock key several times
anyway. No indicator light at all, but that fixed the problem here.

   Don't know if your Dell is suffering a mechanical/electrical glitch like
my keyboard, but it's worth a try to see.

Rich

-- 
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |    The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.        |         Accelerators(TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517      Fax: 503-667-8863



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