[SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

brisbin33 · 2009-02-12 02:03:47

my unhappy solution: latest version of kbd_drv.so is no longer backwards compatible with xorg 1.4.2 - which i wish i could still use.

i can either downgrade xf86-input-keyboard also or just upgrade xorg-server and live without stable compositing... i still haven't decided.

--- OP ---

as of a few days ago i started noticing this:

Xlib: extension "Generic Event Extension" missing on display ":0.0".

showing up randomly. buried in the output of xset q or dumped on screen after a scrot command. nothing seemed actually broken and i've since confirmed through various forum posts that is in affect a meaningless error. this may or may not have something to do with what follows.

today my normal pacman -Syu brought up libX11... mm yummy, yes please.

ho hum, went about my day. came home and thought:

me wrote:

maybe i'll try to fix this Xlib thing...
oh noes! maybe it's got to do with the libX11 upgrade...
zomg! i'm only running xorg-server 1.4.2; maybe that's it...
i'll upgrade to 1.5 then if the error remains downgrade back and go from there... i've still got the old package... easy!

a quick pacman -S xorg-server brought me up to date (and brought in another libpcm-something package that i've since removed)

restart X and test - no change, Xlib: error remains, not xorg related, and a downgrading we go.

a quick pacman -U xorg-server (1.4.2) and i'm back where i was ten minutes ago. that's when all hell broke loose.

i kill X and am brought back to slim (expected behavior). except it was frozen, unresponsive. reboot... slim is still frozen and unresponsive.

fine then, reboot into init 3. startx... ok desktop back. open a terminal. none of my keystrokes are recognized... wtf?

i press Alt+F2 in an effort to bring up gmrun, instead i go to vc/2 wtf? is it as if my keyboard thinks ctrl is being pressed all the time?

i can't figure it out. my system is exactly as it was before i started tinkering... i even removed .serverauth*, .Xauthority, and .DCOP* files so they'd regenerate. i didn't touch xorg.conf, rc.conf, nothing.

my guesses at this point are. upgrading libX11 broke something that wasn't felt until the reboot. or somehow i did something other than pacman -R xorg-1.4 / pacman -S xorg-1.5 / pacman -R xorg-1.5 / pacman -U xorg-1.4.

i'm scared here. what happend?

if i reboot into init 3 my system is fine, acts as normal. only after i startx does my keyboard go AWOL on me and i can't get it back w/o a reboot.

also when in X, everything else in my system seems fine; just the keyboard is funky.

any suggestions?

Last edited by brisbin33 (2009-02-12 16:58:09)

sfabius · 2009-02-12 02:13:40

I had a similar problem with a keyboard, but since I didn't have time to deal with it, used another keyboard I had laying around. Both were usb, but the one that stopped working was a lenovo thing with a keypad (I'm not in my office so I can't look and I can't remember it right now; i can look it up tomorrow if you are interested). Anyway, it had something to do with the x server no longer recognizing the keyboard. You might want to try a different keyboard or at least post what your model is (or this is totally irrelevant, but the subject caught my eye...).

brisbin33 · 2009-02-12 02:28:03

ok quick update:

if i upgrade back to xorg 1.5.3 all is ok keyboard/mouse wise. but that's got it's on problems so i really want it back to the way it was with 1.4.2

when i startx with 1.4.2 Xorg.log shows a single telling error

(EE) No Input driver matching 'kbd'

there seems to lie the rub. now why is that not loading now?

another post around says i need to install xf86-input-{keyboard|mouse}. they were installed, i reinstalled, and no change. still no keyboard

maybe someone can tell me what i need to do to get kbd back?

edit: my keyboard is a logitec EX110 but it was working just fine ten minutes ago so i dunno if that's it.

edit2:

urgg,

$ ls /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input | grep kbd
kbd_drv.so

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep ModulePath
  ModulePath      "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"

and still driver 'kbd' not found? what gives?

Last edited by brisbin33 (2009-02-12 02:44:52)

skottish · 2009-02-12 02:44:48

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xor … d_Settings

brisbin33 · 2009-02-12 02:56:37

skottish wrote:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xor … d_Settings

thank you scottish; i've tried with or without the AutoAddDevices false part and i just now added

Option    "XkbModel" "logitech_base"

as found in the model.lst file.

no change.

again, everything was fine as of 8:15 today, two minutes in xorg 1.5 and i put everything back (i thought) and a reboot. now no keyboard.

skottish · 2009-02-12 02:59:42

Let me try to get clear on this. Did I gather correctly that you were still using xorg-server 1.4.2 until this upgrade?

brisbin33 · 2009-02-12 03:01:14

i was using 1.4.2 happily. upgraded to 1.5.3 for about 3 minutes to see if the Xlib error remained. it did. so i downgraded back to 1.4.2 which i'm "using" now. without a keyboard.

perhaps a rudimentary timeline is in order:

8:00 PM using xorg 1.4.2 happily
8:10 PM pacman -Rd xorg-server 1.4.2
8:11 PM pacman -S xorg-server 1.5.3 (also brings in libpciaccess as dependency)
8:15 PM pacman -Rd xorg-server 1.5.3
8:16 PM pacman -U xorg-server 1.4.2
8:17 PM pcaman -Rd libpciaccess (just incase)
8:20 PM busted system...

literaly that's how it went. i feel blind sided

Last edited by brisbin33 (2009-02-12 03:06:33)

skottish · 2009-02-12 03:04:26

Xlib warning has nothing to do with your problem, so for now try to put that aside.

Does your mouse work at all?

brisbin33 · 2009-02-12 03:07:00

skottish wrote:

Xlib warning has nothing to do with your problem, so for now try to put that aside.
Does your mouse work at all?

mouse is fine. system seems perfect except the keyboard.

skottish · 2009-02-12 03:13:00

Sorry for all of the overly simplistic questions; This isn't the easiest thread to follow.

If your mouse and keyboard where both not working under xorg-server 1.5.x, the solution would be to disable hotplugging or installing xf86-input-evdev. The latter is what I did. My concern right now is that you're mixing up older versions of X with newer HAL and dbus libraries, as well as drivers designed for the current X version.

brisbin33 · 2009-02-12 03:17:40

apologies for the verbose narrative(s).

aside from the libX11 upgrade and the libpciaccess brought in as a dependency my system should be identical _right now_ to what i was yesterday.

yesterday it worked, today it does not.

maybe i can ask pacman what files are owned by xorg-server, remove them, then reinstall xorg-server 1.4.2. would that be wise? is there a pacman option that removes these files for me so i can cleanly reinstall? then see if i get my keyboard back.

skottish · 2009-02-12 03:27:00

Reinstalling xorg-server 1.4.2 is going to require you to track down all of the drivers for that release. As you already know, there were big changes in X in the 1.5 series. It's possible that all of that stuff is still in your cache if you haven't cleared it out. I'm not sure what problems you're going to have in the future with staying at an older version. HAL, dbus, X, and a bunch of other stuff are now under the freedesktop.org specification. I have suspicion the going back, or at least staying there, is going become increasingly difficult.

brisbin33 · 2009-02-12 03:27:35

oh well i guess hanging onto the old xorg finally caught up with me. i'm giving up for the night. i'll have to live without xcompmgr for a while (doesn't work in 1.5.3 for me). no shadows is better than no keyboard i guess.

thanks skottish for trying to understand. i hope you don't mind if i don't mark this thread as [solved], at least for a little while.

skottish · 2009-02-12 03:29:26

Not until you're done, or it becomes stupid. Right now this is a real problem, and clearly you're doing your best.

By the way, the Xlib warning is happening to everyone. It's apparently harmless and will go away with a upgrade in the near future (not Arch related).

brisbin33 · 2009-02-12 03:31:20

skottish wrote:

By the way, the Xlib warning is happening to everyone. It's apparently harmless and will go away with a upgrade in the near future (not Arch related).

yeah, buried in my original post i mentioned that i found other posts saying it was meaningless... i just kept referencing it because it kinda started this whole snowball rolling. thanks for your help.

pat

brisbin33 · 2009-02-12 16:55:58

thought i'd bring some closure to this thread.

it appears that on 2/9/09, kbd_drv.so was upgraded to a driver no longer compatible with xorg 1.4.2.

i hadn't restarted X between then and now so i only felt the effects last night.

pacman -Ql shows that that driver is owned by xf86-input-keyboard, so i _could_ downgrade that package as well and in theory be back to my running system (with a keyboard _and_ with xcompmgr).

seems like a fair amount of trouble only in the sense that x days from now, a similar scenario will probably happen with another driver. hopefully, xorg 1.6 will bring me working compositing again

i'll weigh the options and either downgrade or not; either way, this is [SOLVED]

Arch Linux

#1 2009-02-12 02:03:47

[SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#2 2009-02-12 02:13:40

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#3 2009-02-12 02:28:03

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#4 2009-02-12 02:44:48

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#5 2009-02-12 02:56:37

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#6 2009-02-12 02:59:42

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#7 2009-02-12 03:01:14

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#8 2009-02-12 03:04:26

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#9 2009-02-12 03:07:00

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#10 2009-02-12 03:13:00

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#11 2009-02-12 03:17:40

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#12 2009-02-12 03:27:00

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#13 2009-02-12 03:27:35

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#14 2009-02-12 03:29:26

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#15 2009-02-12 03:31:20

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

#16 2009-02-12 16:55:58

Re: [SOLVED]Strange effects - useless keyboard after reboot

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