Help for captured keyboard!

[zhjj505]

Dear all,

I'm using the Readhat Linux Enterprise 5, and I encountered a problem about captured keyboard need your help. I log in after entering the required username and password using keyboard, but then the keyboard is captured, i.e., I can not enter anything using keyboard. Meanwhile the mouse works well all the time. I encountered this problem when I pressed some keys wrongly two days ago, but unfortunatelly I can not find out these exact keys I pressed. Could you give me some help? Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Damien

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

We have to check if its a User specific problem. Does Keyboard stop responding for other Users too?

[zhjj505]

Thanks for replying!
Yes, it seems it's a user specific problem, b/c the keyboard works well for root and other users. What should I do next? Thank you!

[devils casper]

Which Desktop Environment are you using? Gnome is default DE in RHEL 5.
Let say user_id is zhjj. Login as other user and gain root privileges. Navigate to the /home/zhjj folder and rename .gconfd and .gnome2 folders.

su -
cd /home/zhjj
mv .gnome2 gnome2_bak
mv .gconfd gconfd_bak
exit

Log out and check if keyboard works or not.

[zhjj505]

I'm using the KDE DE in RHEL 5 on my machine. So, how will the above codes be changed according to my DE? Thank you!

[oz]

I'm using the KDE DE in RHEL 5 on my machine. So, how will the above codes be changed according to my DE? Thank you!

Welcome to the forums!

You can do the same thing with KDE by renaming the ~/.kde4 folder then restarting KDE, which should give you a fresh start and perhaps your keyboard will work again. If it doesn't work, you can remove the newly created KDE folder and rename the backed up folder to its original name and seek other solutions.

[zhjj505]

Good news! Following your instruction, I renamed the .kde folder and then restarted the system, I'm glad to find the keyboard works well! Thanks for your warm help!

But I still want to know what's behind the captured keyboard? I remembered I wrongly pressed some keys to cause this problem.

[oz]

It would be hard to tell what went wrong if you don't remember what keys you pressed and when. If you still have the renamed KDE folder, you could go in and compare files in it with the files found in your new KDE folder and maybe find what the exact cause of the keyboard failure was.

Maybe someone else will post some other possible ways that you might trace the problem. Either way, glad you are up and running again!