Arch Linux

jackjackk

Member

Registered: 2010-07-21

Posts: 40

Screen blinks after Alt- commands

If I close a window with Alt-F4, the screen flashes (to black than normal) before closing the window.
Same thing happens when I use Alt-<left arrow> when navigating to previous folder in Nautilus.
The visual effect is similar to taking a screenshot, even if in the latter case screen flashes to white.
Any idea on the solution/debugging of the problem?

Thanks

(I'm using Gnome on latest Archlinux with Intel video card)

Last edited by jackjackk (2015-07-31 19:31:21)

jackjackk

Member

Registered: 2010-07-21

Posts: 40

Re: Screen blinks after Alt- commands

For future reference, I finally found the responsible: a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf with the following content:

# Read and parsed by systemd-localed. It's probably wise not to edit this file
# manually too freely.
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "system-keyboard"
        MatchIsKeyboard "on"
        Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Not sure what exactly was causing problems, but after deletion of the file, "Alt" doesn't trigger strange screen blinking any more.

Last edited by jackjackk (2015-09-16 16:57:57)

jackjackk

Member

Registered: 2010-07-21

Posts: 40

Re: Screen blinks after Alt- commands

For future reference, it wasn't that. After restarting the problem presented itself again, even though it disappeared after removing the file...

The only debug I could come up with was with xev, which gives me a lot of messages like this

MappingNotify event, serial 90, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
    request MappingKeyboard, first_keycode 8, count 248

when pressing an alt combination causing problems.
The problem also doesn't occur with "Alt gr" (but it feels very unnatural to me to use the right Alt).

Who knows...

Last edited by jackjackk (2015-09-16 22:48:59)

taro_curly

Member

Registered: 2011-07-06

Posts: 5

Re: Screen blinks after Alt- commands

This is an old thread, but I was wondering if you ever managed to figure out what was going on. I'm running into the same problem.

carbolymer

Member

Registered: 2012-04-25

Posts: 45

Re: Screen blinks after Alt- commands

I know that this thread was started almost year ago, but I've just stumbled upon this problem. Whenever I pressed Alt+F1...F6 or Alt+arrow my screen was flickering. This happened after nvidia update. It seems that nvidia driver has regenerated xorg.conf. The issue was that these shortcuts are responsible for changing virtual terminal and somehow xserver was trying to intercept these keystrokes. The solution is to put the following lines into xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option "DontVTSwitch" "true"
EndSection

Imo this thread can be marked as solved.