KDM kills my keyboard! [SOLVED!]

[Frank Gore]

On March 9, 2003 03:59, Frank Gore wrote:
> I was playing around with having KDM come up on boot, just for the heck of
> it. Everything seems to be working fine, except that when KDM comes up, my
> keyboard ceases to function. I can't type in any passwords! The mouse works
> fine, though.
>
> I tried enabling password-less login for my account, just to see if I could
> log in just by clicking the "Go!" button without having to type in
> anything. That worked fine too. I was able to login to KDE and everything
> came up as it should. Except the keyboard still didn't work. Not for
> typing, not for the three-finger-salute, nothing.
>
> If I run KDM manually from the console, the same thing happens. Keyboard
> input disapears as soon as KDM comes up.
>
> On the other hand, if I switch from KDM to the console (using the "Console
> Login" option on the KDM window), then my keyboard works fine on the
> console. As soon as I switch back to KDM, the keyboard stops working again.
>
> I'm not one to cry over a graphical login manager. I actually prefer
> logging into the console. But I'm trying to setup an "easy-to-use" system
> for a customer as an example of something elegant that could be used to
> replace Windows. Things would be much more convincing if I could get KDM to
> run right instead of making the customer type "startx" at the console.
> Ignorant people associate this with typing "win" at the dos prompt, and
> therefore assume it must be inferior to Windows XP.
>
> BTW, I have a USB keyboard, and this computer has no ps/2 ports so I can't
> try my ps/2 keyboard. I've never had any issues with USB keyboards up until
> now.

Turns out my problem stemmed from an incorrect XF86Config line, and not KDM at 
all. In the keyboard section, I had the following line:

        Option "XkbOptions" "grp:switch,grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll"

This was left over from some experimenting with keyboard layout switching 
(which never worked anyways). It didn't affect the running of XFree86 in any 
way (or XDM for that matter), but apparently that one line was causing KDM to 
ignore keyboard input. Removing the line from XF86Config fixed my problems.

Frank
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