[PLUG] interesting (painful) mystery

Kurt Sussman plug at merlot.com
Mon Oct 22 17:18:47 UTC 2007


alan (alan at clueserver.org) typed this ...
> 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.
> >
> > If I boot a rescue disk and mount the root partition (this can be tricky
> > when the 't' is unavailable) and reboot, the keys are back to normal.
> > Originally I chrooted that partition and reset the passwords for my
> > account and root, but that turns out to be unnecessary; all it needs is
> > to be mounted.
> 
> If you can get into a working X session, see what keyboard layout you have 
> defined.  It may have gotten set to some weird non-standard layout.  I am 
> not certain where the default keyboard layout is kept.  It has been a long 
> time since I have had to change it by hand.  (Not in this century, at 
> least...

Once (and exactly once) I was able to log in at KDM but typing in an
xterm showed the same key problems. Normally the problem manifested at
boot and I couldn't get past the login prompt or dialog.

Is the keymap loaded when the partition is mounted? That's when the
problem goes away, after I boot into other than the installed OS. I don't
think that's the case, so I haven't checked the keymap. I guess I
should, for completeness.

Thanks.

--Kurt
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Merlot Research Group, Inc               http://www.merlot.com
    kls[at]merlot.com        GPG key 82505A74       GTalk: ratbelt



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