Keyboard periodically locks on Ubuntu and GNOME 2

Question

I'm on Ubuntu 10.04 with GNOME 2.30.

Once every couple of days, I might be pressing something or doing something – I haven't found out what it is, though last time I was pressing the "mouse lock" button on my on-board mouse on my laptop – my keyboard simply locks down.

Some keys work, like ALT+CTRL+F1-6 and also ALT+SHIFT still changes the keyboard layout, but everything else doesn't work, no letters, no other shortcuts.

To fix it, I go to ALT+CTRL+F1 (Terminal) and run

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

But I'm getting kinda tired of doing that every now and then. Any ideas if in Gnome there's a shortcut for "Kill my Keyboard" or something?

Answer 1

I'm guessing that your X server is getting confused, based on the facts that a) your keyboard gets you to a working console and b) killing X (via gdm) clears the trouble.

Unfortunately, stock Lucid disables the "Kill X Server" Ctrl-Alt-Backspace sequence. Fortunately enabling it is easy System > Preferences > Keyboard > Options... > Key Squence to kill the X server.

Yes, you'll still be killing X, but it will be faster. /var/log/Xorg.log.0 may give you some hints as to the failure, or perhaps syslog or dmesg or kern.log. Happy hunting.