Is this an OS problem or a hardware problem ?

Recently I will be typing something and sometimes there will be a little delay, and one letter will get typed mutiple times. Eg, say I type "end", I type "e" and it appears., then I type "n" and "d", there will be a delay after I type "n" and after the delay "ennnnnnnnnnnnnnd" appears.
This has happened in firefox and in xemacs (and with different letters).
I'm used to delays, usually happens in firefox, what I type does not appear immediately on screen, but I have ascribed that to me opening like 120 tabs. But this repeat letter occurence is new.
Is this a keyboard problem, or is it OS related ?

 

sounds os to me.

 

Sounds like the same FF issue I experienced In Suse, borg. I've been having trouble with FF in Linux, XP and OSX for a couple of months. As I type this post, I'm using Konqueror, though, and it's working just fine.

 

FF3 is fine for me. Only that sometimes the Flash doesn't load and becomes a grey box. And I'll have to restart FF3.

 

But note that I had the problem in xemacs too.
But yeah, now I'm leaning towards the OS too, seeing as the problem has occured with multiple keys, if it was the keyboard I'd have expected that one key would be bad.
In the above sentence, when I typed "I" it appeared "IIIIIIIIII". since both shift and "i" keys were invlved it does seem to be OS related.

 

wearetheborg, one thing that comes to mind is to do "man xset" and then play with autorepeat and keyboard sensitivity options.

"xset q" shows the current settings, "xset r rate 600 20" is an example of setting delays. If that has any effect on your problem, it's definitely OS-related.

Also, what's your laptop make, and are you using a touchpad (may be related)?

Icewalker

 

Its a dell precision, Suse SLED 10, it has a touchpad, but I dont use it (I use an external mouse)

 

If it happens in programs other than Firefox as the OP has stated, then it can't be Firefox. Beyond that I can't tell you much else. Weird issue.

 

Move the mouse pointer around in circles, trying to keep the speed consistent, moving the mouse pointer on a clear area of the desktop background - does the mouse pointer pause?

 

It may be a messed up keyboard delay setting, try looking to see if you accidentally set letter delay to something high.

 

Now if he could only apply that to fixing his problem.

 

No, no delay that I could see.

But normally letters appear as soon as a type, if the delay was messed up, would the problem not be constant ?

 

That may be so but checking could be good, i know someone who had their Xubuntu partition wiped out entirely because someone was using their computer from within XP which could see Xubuntu (with a program).

 

Here are my settings:

Code:

:~> xset q
Keyboard Control:
  auto repeat:  on    key click percent:  0    LED mask:  00000002
  auto repeat delay:  500    repeat rate:  30
  auto repeating keys:  00ffffffdffffbbf
                        fadfffdfffdfe5ef
                        ffffffffffffffff
                        ffffffffffffffff
  bell percent:  50    bell pitch:  400    bell duration:  100
Pointer Control:
  acceleration:  2/1    threshold:  4
Screen Saver:
  prefer blanking:  yes    allow exposures:  yes
  timeout:  0    cycle:  0

 

Try turning autorepeat off or increasing the delay.

 

I increased the delay to 1 sec, and the problem persists. I'm now thinking this is a hardware problem.

 

are u using an ATI driver? If so.. try updating it to the latest one. And test firefox.

 

Nope, NVIDIA one. And this problem has occured in firefox, opera, xemacs. I think it has also occured in bash shells.

BTW, why would a video driver be relevant for keyboard settings ?

 

check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. make sure it has

Option "XkbLayout" "us+inet"

or whatever on one line instead "us" on one line and "inet" on the next line.

 

I have

Code:

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver       "kbd"
  Identifier   "Keyboard[0]"
  Option       "Protocol" "Standard"
  Option       "XkbLayout" "us"
  Option       "XkbModel" "pc104"
  Option       "XkbRules" "xfree86"
EndSection

What does inet do ?

 

it's a file used by xorg for symbols and such. for example, if you press shift + 6 and it takes several times of pressing to get the '^' symbol to display in your terminal or firefox or whatever. try changing,

Option "XkbLayout" "us"

to

Option "XkbLayout" "us+inet"

then ctrl + alt + backspace to kill X and log back in and try out your keyboard.

 

see my above post. a lot of dependent stuff is handled by xorg.conf which is affected by the installation of a video driver. if you look in /etc/X11/ you may have several xorg.conf* files. xorg.conf.bk, xorg.conf.old, xorg.conf.nvidia-old, or whatever... so it's possible for your keyboard, mouse, second monitor, etc to get whacked if you update your video driver or have the wrong one installed.

 

Thanks, I've applied the change, lets see how it goes.

EDIT: Unfortunately the problem remains

 

Uncomment the Option "XkbRules" "xfree86" out and see if that work or change "xfree86" to "xorg".

 

Uncomment or comment out ?

 

Sorry, its comment out .

 

Have you tried spending some time in an unrelated live cd and see if it occurs there?

I'm kind of leaning towards a problem with the keyboard's buffer.

 

What keyboard is this? Is it the internal in your laptop? I had this exact type of problem with a Logitech keyboard for a while, I think it was just weak batteries in the wireless keyboard.

 

I've been running on windows for thr past day (with a lot less firefox etc windows), and the problem has not occured here
Could opening up 100 or tabs and ofrefox taking up 1GB of memory cause this problem in other appplications ?

Yeah internal dell keyboard built into laptop

 

Why the heck do you have 100 tabs open? Does it only happen under that sort of situation?

Hrm... you could be hitting some bad memory addresses or bad sectors. Try running memtest overnight. A good hard drive diagnostic wouldn't hurt, either.

Try switching between the CFQ and anticipatory schedulers.

It's definitely sounding more like an X or Firefox problem now, though. Are you up to date?

I'm trying to stimulate my memory here. I have this feeling I've seen something like this before, but I just can't remember. Maybe tomorrow.

 

Heh, I like having multiple tabs open, NBR, thinkpad forums, email, linux etc. About 100 tabs of firefox, 10 of opera, 20 bash shells

I dunno if it happens only under that situation, as its always what I've had.

The SMART data for the HDD indicated everything to be OK, how else can I test the HDD ?

What are they and how do i switch ?

I dont think so, I'm using SLED 10 with SP2, and they certainly have old packages.

 

http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/iosched.htm

I'm thinking it might help if you're having a problem when you're hitting swap. Is your disk spun down when this happens, by chance?

 

this is not a hardware/memory issue. i'm having the same problem on each 8.04 install. however, after updating the linux-image and whatever, including xorg, the keyboard behaves as expected.

edit: to make things even more complicated, i did 2 raid 0 installs on my laptop and for the 1st install, i only needed to update xorg. on the second install, i did not update xorg and the issue cleared after updating the kernel/modules. on 2 desktops, i only needed to add +intl in xorg. on another box i had to add the device to the serverlayout. it has not been consistent but i've been using the alternate cd and dvd iso for installs.

 

Well I ran MS windows a and it was fine. Then I ran memtest for 16hrs and it had no errors. So it seems its a linux problem

 

That sucks, but at least if it's the same problem as szandor, it sounds fixed. You just need to find a new distro for awhile, or wait until yours is updated/patched.

 

Enable to hardy-proposed repo's, it may have something in there that will fix this. Also, try posting this over at Ubuntu Forums, they should be able to help.

 

I'm running SUSE SLED, so I'm basically screwed till I change the distro
Not many support forums for SLED.

 

Yeah, i thought you ran SUSE but there might be something like that in SUSE.

 

did you ever try:

Code:

xmodmap /usr/share/xmodmap/`insert_whatever_layout_from_the_directory`

from your x session?