Keyboard stops responding in KDE. (tummy.com, ltd. Journal Entry)
tummy.com: we do linux

Tuesday August 25, 2009 at 14:23
Subject: Keyboard stops responding in KDE.
Keywords: Bug, KDE
Posted by: Sean Reifschneider

I've been battling a problem with KDE for something over a year now, and Kevin figured it out for me. The problem is that about once a week my keyboard would stop responding except when doing auto-repeat. So, if I held it for around half a second it would send characters, but by that point it was doing auto-repeat. So it was a real trick getting just one character out of it. The mouse was fine, the keyboard on the console was fine, and restarting X would solve it without a reboot.

Kevin found that there's a KDE thing called "slow keys" which is turned on by holding the shift key for a while. Mine was set with a delay of half a second, but in the System Settings -> Accessibility panel it said it was disabled. If I enabled and then disabled it using that, the keyboard would start responding as normal again.

I went in and set the delay down to the minimum, and I also disabled "Use gestures for slow keys activation". So, hopefully it won't activate, but if it does the delay is small enough that it's not going to be a problem.

Thanks Kevin.
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