Keyboard suddenly stopped working in FC6 on Sony Vaio

[ggulik]

I was in the middle of writing a document in Open Office when I suddenly discovered the keyboard stopped working. No key lock, nothing. The mouse worked so I logged out to reset the X server. I could log in with GDM but once logged in, no keyboard.


Hmm, bizzare, so I rebooted...

The keyboard works in the BIOS
The keyboard works in GDM allowing me to log in
Once logged in the keyboard doesn't work!

I even tried to do a full power cycle.
Same thing.

Ok, I tried the previous kernel, same thing.

I'm in XP now and the keyboard works just fine.

Aaaargh!

This one has me truly stumped. I even ssh'd in from another machine and checked dmesg and there was no clue at all what could be happening. I know I did a yum update earlier in the day but the keyboard worked for hours after the update then suddenly stopped working in the middle of typing. It DOES work BEFORE logging but once logged in nada.

Any ideas?

[ms1234]

A friend of mine (using debian) had a similar problem. Turned out his disk was full so it couldn't write to the proper device or something. Funny yes. Does it solve you problem? Dunno. You might want to check it out

[ggulik]

Unfortunately that's not it. /home has 2.9G free.

You might be on to something because I could log in as root and the keyboard works just fine. It's just when I log in as my regular user that it doesn't work. I'm now guessing something got corrupted so I'm restoring my home directory from yesterday's backups.

[ggulik]

Ok, I think I figured it out. I appear to have accidentally enabled Slow Keys when I was editing an image with GIMP. I was holding down the SHIFT key and a pop-up came up and I probably pressed the wrong key. I just tried it again and a pop-up asking me if I wanted to enable "SLOW KEYS". I must have hit "Activate" by accident and when I turn it on the keyboard stopped working!!

I don't know what gconf setting it was so all I did was restore the entire ~/.gconf directory from the previous night's backup and I was back in business.

[phillip]

Originally Posted by ggulik

Ok, I think I figured it out. I appear to have accidentally enabled Slow Keys when I was editing an image with GIMP. I was holding down the SHIFT key and a pop-up came up and I probably pressed the wrong key. I just tried it again and a pop-up asking me if I wanted to enable "SLOW KEYS". I must have hit "Activate" by accident and when I turn it on the keyboard stopped working!!

I don't know what gconf setting it was so all I did was restore the entire ~/.gconf directory from the previous night's backup and I was back in business.

I have fedora fc6 as a guest pc in the lobby ofmy hotel, and have come across this often. Is there anyway to permanently disable slow keys?