That would indeed be quite unpleasant. I see you tried switching virtual terminals and killing X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, and it sounds like the lock keys are also unresponsive. Considering that, you may not have any luck with Ctrl-Alt-Del either.
I quote my mail: ctrl-alt+f1-f6 are ignored, ctrl-alt+backspace is ignored. Everything I do keyboardwise is completely ignored, including switching terminals or killing X.
Have you any way of logging into the computer remotely, such as SSH, assuming it would still respond to that? That is a much nicer way to kill a computer that has locked up, and in many cases, you need only kill the deviating processes. This might also allow further investigation of the problem.
That would be wonderful if I had that opportunity, but unfortunately I don't. Only one computer here.
Other than that, read http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO-8.html#ss8.6 if you are not familiar with magic SysRq. It's important to know why it's good, why it's bad, and how you can use it to break toys. Then try the following, waiting a bit between each to let them take effect:
Alt-SysRq-K to kill all process on the active virtual terminal.
Alt-SysRq-E to send the TERM signal to all processes but init
Alt-SysRq-I to send the KILL signal to all processes but init
Alt-SysRq-L to send the KILL signal to all processes, including init
Alt-SysRq-S to run an emergency sync on all mounted filesystems to prevent data loss
Alt-SysRq-U to remount them as read-only to prevent data loss and stave off fsck on reboot
Alt-SysRq-R to turn off keyboard raw mode. This may let you use Ctrl-Alt-Del if it wasn't working before.
Alt-SysRq-B to force reboot
Alt-SysRq-O to force shutdown
These bypass regular keyboard handling, so there is a chance they might work, if they are enabled.
I'll have a look at that, but I don't have high hopes, seeing that even numlock toggling doesn't come through.
I'm using Linux for stability.. this is pissing me off mightily.
That's understandable, but remember that we're all very lucky to be using something that is given to us.
Absolutely, I'm not complaining.
Again, I don't think it's a KDE problem -- it sounds much too severe for that. Without pointing too many fingers, the underlying X is more likely the culprit, and that may well give varying symptoms for the same problem under different desktop environments and window managers. I would still try downgrading Xlibs.
Alright, I'm gonna give that a shot soon. Thanks a lot for the help. Do you think I should repost this bug description on debian-user then?
Daniel
PS: This is completely unrelated: What would be the easiest way to enable me to just reply to mailinglist messages with my email client's reply function? Right now that defaults to mailing back to ONLY the user who sent mail, and that's not very helpful. Is there some simple way of changing that, in thunderbird? I see that the messages is forwarded with the original "From:" intact and the mailinglist is only mentioned in the to: section, with no specific reply-to in the mail. I've started putting in a reply-to to kde@xxxxxxxxxxxx now, but that is a bothersome thing to do for every single mail as well.. there's got to be a simple way to have this done automatically.
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