[conspire] (forw) Re: [Felton LUG] Keyboard woes fixed

[Rick Moen]

[redirecting back to the mailing list]

Quoting Ross Bernheim (rossbernheim at gmail.com):

> Rick,
> 
> Not the worst thing I’ve heard of. When I was in the Army, heard of an
> electronics tech who spent two weeks troubleshooting a system that was
> ‘dead’. The system was in a shelter on the back of a truck. I knew the
> tech as we had been in school at Ft.  Devens at the same time and in
> the same company though we were taking different courses. When I was
> at Ft. Devens a few years later for another course, one of my fellow
> students related the incident.
> 
>  It was he who noticed that the main circuit breaker for the system
>  was off and asked if that might not be the problem. It was.

Sattinger's Law:  'It works better if you plug it in.'

As they might be of interest, I include two posts I made to an earlier
phase of the weeks-long Felton-LUG thread about Meg's keyboard problem,
as they might be of interest to people interested in diagnostics:




Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2015 17:32:34 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: "felton-lug at googlegroups.com" <felton-lug at googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [Felton LUG] Keyboard woes -- what stupid thing did I do?

Quoting 'Meg McRoberts' via Felton LUG (felton-lug at googlegroups.com):

> And my problems are back -- that didn't take long!  So I tried to type
> ABCDE and I get sAsBsCsDsE -- and LF also generates an "s"So running
> xev is a problem -- I managed to copy-paste the xev characters butwhen
> I press Enter to execute it, it becomes xevs and doesn't work.  I went
> into that Moen thing and pasted the xev string -- got a "run xev"
> option soI chose that.

There's a Moen thing?

Is it brilliant, witty, and devilishly handsome?

> As the old song says, strange things happen in this world... <C2><A0>;-)meg

The great philosopher Jagger also observed that you can't always get
what you want -- but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get
what you need.
 
Further cosmic wisdom will have to wait, as Magic 8 Ball says 'Reply
hazy try again'.

-- 
Cheers,                        My pid is Inigo Montoya.  You kill -9    
Rick (footloose man') Moen     my parent process.  Prepare to vi.
rick at linuxmafia.com
McQ!  (4x80)



Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2015 13:53:48 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: felton-lug at googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [Felton LUG] Keyboard woes -- what stupid thing did I do?

Quoting Dan Buckler (dan.buckler at gmail.com):

> I am still interested to know is the problem recurs if you ssh into
> the machine from another machine.  This will fault isolate to the
> console logic if not.

My first step would be to boot a live-CD Linux distro, in order to split
the problem space into hardware-caused or software-caused.  

The term 'CD', here, is an archaism left over from early days, when my
crowd at Linuxcare invented the concept with the Linuxcare Bootable
Business Card and Klaus Knopper then used some of our techniques to
create Knoppix.  Intended reference is not _just_ to optical media.
These days, many live-CD distros boot from USB flash drives.

It's very useful to keep a recent live-CD distro around, for diagnosis
and lots of other uses.  I personally like aptosid for this purpose.

If you boot a live-CD distro and the symptom goes away, then, hey, it's
a problem with your installed software / configuration.  If it doesn't,
then it's the keyboard controller chip or something like that.  Since
you've tried multiple keyboards and the symptom is identical across each
of them, it's astronomically unlikely to be a hardware defect that
magically arose on all of them.  But actually that _could_ happen, and
in one freaky case my Steve Litt once wrote about, it did:  The same 
problem came up with multiple keyboards, and it turned out in the end
that an unusual electric problem on the motherboard was damaging in turn
each of the keyboards connected to it for testing.

In that regard, what would have been better than a series of keyboards
would have been _one_ known-good keyboard for cross-checking.

By the way, also try (with the power off) a little WD-40 in the keyboard
and mouse holes on the computer, and the keyboard and mouse plugs that
plug into those holes.  Can't hurt; could prevent intermittent
connection problems.  But this probably would not cure the bizarre
described problem.

-- 
Cheers,                         "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog --
Rick Moen                       unless you type 'woof, woof, woof'."
rick at linuxmafia.com                                               -- pyellman
McQ! (4x80)