Possible Solution for Frequent Keyboard Hangups in KDE.

[Baruch Siach]

Hi Nadav,

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 09:14:00AM +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 14, 2012, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Possible Solution for Frequent Keyboard Hangups in KDE.":
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > in case you are experiencing cases where the keyboard in KDE become
> > unresponsive sometimes, then I have discovered a way to predictably
> > reproduce this hang-up, and to avoid it. See this KDE bug here:
> 
> Sadly, this is a much bigger problem than you describe, which has
> plagued various distributions for the last year: People have been reporting -
> and it also repeatedly happened to me personally - that X Windows's
> keyboard "hangs" while the rest of the computer (as well as the mouse)
> continues to work normally. To some people, this "hang" happened several
> times a week, bringing Linux's reliability close to that of 1990s MS
> Windows :(
> 
> Further investigation revealed that the keyboard is NOT actually hung,
> but rather in a little-known state called "SlowKeys" - if you press a
> key for over a second, it *will* be accepted. If you care enough, you can
> actually type something in this weird state. But clearly this state was
> meant for people with very specific disabilities - and not for the
> general population. So how and why is does one randomly get into this
> state?
> 
> Continuing the investigation, you'll discover that when X is in a new
> and little-known state called "AccessX", it enables the dreaded
> "SlowKeys" mode when you press the shift key for 10 seconds. Yes, that's
> right - if you daydream with your hand on the shift, bye bye keyboard.

I just wanted to note that for me, at least, another 10 seconds Shift key 
press toggles the keyboard to its normal non-SlowKeys state.

> So, you might be asking, why is this AccessX state even turned on by
> default? Apparently, it *shouldn't*. X does *not* turn it on by default.
> But various buggy Gnome and KDE crap do. On my Fedora, it is GDM (the Gnome
> login screen - which is used even if you end up running KDE) which turns it
> on (apparently to help people with disabilities to log in) but forgets to
> turn it back off when it starts the session. Various window managers also
> turn this feature on - it should be off by default unless the user chooses
> this feature, but apparently (as I can see from various bug reports in Fedora)
> most window managers got this wrong in some way or another. For the GDM
> bug (which I described above) is probably causing the problem for most users.
> 
> My solution was to install a utility called "xkbset" which knows about
> these new X features, and turn them off. "xkbset -a" turns off AccessX,
> which turns off that terrible
> press-shift-for-10-seconds-and-your-keyboard-is-toast feature.
> I run this "xkbset -a" as part of the session startup, and haven't had a
> keyboard hang since.

Tanks for the tip. Adding to my ~/.xsession script.

baruch

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