I have an odd problem which occurs on 2 machines - my main workstations
at work and in my home office. Periodically with no discernable
pattern the keyboard will "disconnect" from each machine. The keyboard
is still responsive - I can, for instance do the
<SCROLL-LOCK><SCROLL-LOCK># to change to a different machine, and the
keyboard is completely OK. But <CTRL><ALT><BACKSPACE> for instance
does not work.
When the problem occurs I see nothing unusual in /var/log/messages or
/var/log/Xorg.0.log, and dmesg shows nothing odd.
The office machine is running FC5 on an athlon xp2500+ while the
machine at home is running FC6 on an athlon 64 x2 dual core 4600+.
Both systems have all patches completely up-to-date (as of noon
yesterday, anyway). Both have at least 1GB ram, large drives (mixed
scsi and sata/scsi) with 3-4GB of swap. All of the hardware is
different between the 2 machines.
There are only 3 commonalities between the configurations on the two
machines. First both have a default run level of 3, not 5, on each.
Second, I have similar .Xdefaults and profile files on both machines,
and finally both systems attach to their keyboard/monitor through a KVM
switch (but a different brand/model. (One system's kvm switch has 2
linux, 1 sparc/solaris and 1 win2000 machine on it, while the other's
has 2 linux and 2 win2000 boxen on it.) But I had used kvm switches
for years before this problem ever started cropping up during FC3 IIRC.
The problem doesn't seem to be related to how heavily the machine is
being used and occurs at random intervals. I can go 3 weeks without it
happening on either machine, but then the next day it can happen 2-3
times on either or both machines. Not always, but usually (I *think*) I
will have an openoffice window (doc or spreadsheet) open along with at
least a couple of other windows (xterms), but the OO window is not
necessarily active. OTOH, I've had it happen with only an xterm window
open and nothing else.
When it occurs the mouse still works, and I can still close most apps
and make a clean exit from Xwindows. So this is a nuisance - not a
life-or-death showstopper - but it's a real pain.
The problem occurs (on each system) for all users, even users with
everything set to system default on both.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated - I've tried searching
bugzilla and have RTFM'ed until my eyes started to bug out, but all
without any success.
Thanks in advance ...
--
william w. austin waustin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
"life is just another phase i'm going through. this time, anyway ..."
