[techtalk] Slightly OT: keyboard/X windows on Solaris

Amanda Babcock alb at quandary.org
Mon Apr 16 21:28:33 EST 2001


I have a problem that is driving me up a wall.

It's not Linux-related, or even FreeBSD.  It's actually on my Solaris
box, which runs on Sun hardware, a Sparc Classic.

I have two identical keyboards for this thing.  They both have this weird
caps lock problem.  It's not normal caps lock - the light on the caps lock
key never comes on, you can't get lowercase by pressing shift like you can
with normal caps lock, and some other keys, like tab, stop working (although
the number keys are unaffected).  

Partly it acts like a mechanical problem: if I hit certain keys, such as
caps lock (even though the light doesn't come on) or, just now, the Alt
key (the Sun alt key marked with the diamond, not the one that says "Alt"),
it goes into caps lock mode and won't come out no matter what I do.  
Xmodmap will not fix it, pressing Caps Lock again won't fix it, xmodmapping
some *other* key to Caps Lock and pressing *that* does not fix it.  And 
Shift doesn't do anything to the letter keys, although it still works with
the number keys, which don't get caps locked to begin with.

So it seems pretty mechanical, since messing around with xmodmap doesn't fix
it, except for one thing.  Logging out of the X session, back to xdm or 
whatever Openwindows calls it, fixes the problem.

I don't understand the mechanical/software interaction that's going on here.
What is it doing??  I used to think it was just this keyboard, but that was
before I realized that logging out fixed the problem (until the next time I
hit the wrong key).

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Amanda




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