[ale] strange keyboard problem

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Fri 2008-01-11 10:31:55 -0500, James Sumners wrote:

> Ugh, testing. That translates to "constantly broken" in my mind.

Really?  That doesn't match my experience with debian at all.  the
unstable-to-testing transition process [0] is actually pretty
rigorous.  I've been running debian testing on my primary machine for
years.  Problems do come in, but the trouble-to-performance ratio is
way better than i've seen for friends on other distros who i help
troubleshoot.  then again, i'm only usually seeing their problems, so
there's a sampling bias there.

Back on topic: Preston, has your friend tried creating a different
user and logging in as that user?  It sounds like it might be a
configuration problem for her specific user account (i.e. something
amiss in her config files, as James suggests).

I don't think that reconfiguring gdm will help, because if she's able
to log in, gdm sounds like it's working fine.

If she wants to create a new user from the command line (without X),
she can press Ctrl-Alt-F1 for the first Virtual Terminal and log in
there.  If she can get superuser privileges (log in as root, or su to
root, or use sudo), making a new user is just:

  adduser

then switch back to the graphical console (on etch, it defaults to the
7th VT, so Ctrl+Alt+F7) and try to log in as the new user.  does the
keyboard work for that user?

         --dkg

PS If your friend is interested in Linux, you should invite her to
   this list.  If she can tolerate the unfortunate regressions to
   boyzone that ALE seems to go through intermittently, there's a lot
   of good advice and ideas here.  I'd be happy to see the boyzone
   bullshit disappear entirely, myself.

[0] http://www.debian.org/devel/testing
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