[PLUG] interesting (painful) mystery
alan
alan at clueserver.org
Mon Oct 22 17:24:00 UTC 2007
On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Kurt Sussman wrote:
> 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.
I think everything defaults to the system keymap. If that is bjorked,
then the who system will display the same behavior.
> 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.
If you load a different OS, it will have a different keymap.
--
Never trust a queue structure designed by a cryptographer.
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