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JJJollyjim

Member

Registered: 2013-07-28

Posts: 21

[SOLVED] Black flash on certain keyboard shortcuts, can't switch VTs

Hello,

I've been having this issue for a month or two, and it is rather frustrating. I am using a MacBook Pro, with XFCE and LightDM. After ~10% of restarts, the issue does not show, but the rest of the time it does. Whether it happens or not does not change except on restarts.

There are 3 problems, which I believe all have the same root cause:

1. Certain keyboard shortcuts cause a black flash of the whole screen, before the shortcut takes effect. The ones I've identified are Alt-F2 through Alt-F6 and Alt-Left/Alt-Right;

2. My caps-lock key which is bound to escape (`setxkbmap -option caps:escape`) still works as escape, but the LED also toggles;

3. I cannot switch virtual terminals with Ctrl-Alt-F* (note that I didn't actually try this on a boot where the other issues were not occurring, so I'm not certain it's related).

I am assuming that this has something to do with getty, due to the range of shortcuts which cause the flash.

journalctl --no-pager --boot _SYSTEMD_UNIT=getty@tty1.service

shows a whole bunch of log output, see here. It looks like some of my keyboard input is being passed to getty's login screen(!!).

Much of the time, getty appears to not be running at all:

~ ❯❯❯ ps aux | grep getty
jamie     2239  0.0  0.0  10732  2204 pts/2    S+   21:41   0:00 grep --color=auto getty

Occasionally it starts, but soon stops again:

~ ❯❯❯ ps aux | grep getty
root      4046  0.0  0.0   7940  1676 tty1     Ss+  21:43   0:00 /sbin/agetty --noclear tty1 linux
jamie     4277  0.0  0.0  10732  2196 pts/2    S+   21:43   0:00 grep --color=auto getty

Any idea what is going on here, and how I can fix it? I have little experience with this area of the system. Thanks in advance for any advice!

edit: I should mention that my laptop has an Fn key, which must be held to use F* keys for their usual purposes. When I referred above to shortcuts containing F* keys, I was holding the Fn key to use them. Nothing happens when using Ctrl-Alt-F* without the Fn key.

Last edited by JJJollyjim (2015-09-27 08:58:58)

JJJollyjim

Member

Registered: 2013-07-28

Posts: 21

Re: [SOLVED] Black flash on certain keyboard shortcuts, can't switch VTs

Solved by sheep in IRC. Thanks sheep!

For future readers:
Problem was, I had lightdm configured to start on tty1, whereas the default is 7. Who knows why I had it configured that way, but `mv /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.pacnew /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf` fixed it.

basxto

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2015-10-01

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] Black flash on certain keyboard shortcuts, can't switch VTs

Mine was also set to tty1. This was probably the past default configuration, since I'm used to have my graphical environment on tty7 and there is no reason to set it to tty1.

Caused a black flash of the whole screen before I could login for quiet some time now. After the last update meta-key also caused blinking, ctrl-alt-F* stopped working as you described it.

I guess I should update configurations more often.