[lug] Keyboard Map Problem?

[D. Stimits]

Nate Duehr wrote:
> 
> Well, I was stumped today by a co-worker who'd done something
> "interesting" to his laptop.
> 
> He's running a Toshiba Tecra 8100 as a dual-boot Win2K Pro and RH 7.0
> (fresh install) machine.
> 
> Somewhere along the way today, his "d" key stopped working.
> 
> Here's the part I don't understand and it's making me nuts...
> 
> At the login prompt with just the getty and the login program doing the
> keyboard chores, it works.
> 
> As soon as you hit Bash (or any other shell, we tried changing his
> default login shell), and get your prompt.  "d" stops working.
> 
> Certain programs like vi would cause it to start working again.  I
> have a number of assumptions why, but my assumptions don't seem to
> explain the behaviour, so I obviously must have a HUGE knowledge gap in
> my understanding of how Unix systems get user input.

I don't have any idea what is causing it, but there is something useful
to test. The control-v before any character causes the next one to be
literal inside of most shells, and vi as well. So if you were to hit a
control-v, then d, the next character (regardless of what it is), should
show up. For example, control-g is normally bell on consoles, control-v
then control-g shows up as:
^g
Escape preceded by control-v shows as:
^[

So it will offer a clue as to what it thinks it is if anything is being
generated. If no keypress was detected, then the next press after that
will show up, possibly modified by the control-v.

> ^
> Two things:
> 
> 1. What the heck was going on here?  Any theories?
> 2. Can someone guru-ish enough to know briefly summarize the usual
> things that happen to things like the keyboard setup on a typical Linux
> system... how do my pokes and pecks end up doing useful things and how
> can I mess with it.  (not that I want to, but now I'm just downright
> curious about this "stuff" that 99.9% of the time "just worked" so I
> never learned about it very in-depth.
> 
> --
> Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>
> 
> GPG Key fingerprint = DCAF 2B9D CC9B 96FA 7A6D AAF4 2D61 77C5 7ECE C1D2
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> 
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