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#1 2014-08-03 02:23:28

HotblackDesiato
Member
Registered: 2014-08-03
Posts: 4

[SOLVED] Console: backspace, delete, ctrl not working

I have the follwoing problem: I have just noticed that on two of my four Arch Linux installations, several keys in the console (not X, the text console doesn't work!) no longer work. Only a question mark (inverted) gets displayed when I press delete, backspace, ctrl etc. Regular characters work, incl. umlauts like "ö".

These two machines have an NVIDIA graphics card. Thus I believe it is related to the new proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver (340.25).

On both machines the console had been working before.

I have googled a bit, but found no solution.

I use the vesa fb module for the frame buffer.

Here is my vconsole.conf, which I use on all 4 computers:

KEYMAP=de-latin1
FONT=lat9w-16
FONT_MAP=8859-15

This is the output of 'locale':

LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Here is mkinitcpio.conf (stripped of comment lines) on these two machines:

MODULES=""
BINARIES=""
FILES=""
HOOKS="base udev autodetect modconf block filesystems btrfs keyboard archlogo consolefont keymap dkms vboxhost vboxguest numlock"

I first thought it might be related to my initrd. Hence I tried MODULES="nvidia", but no difference. I also deleted "consolefont" and "keymap" from HOOKS, but no change.


Any ideas?

Stefan

Last edited by HotblackDesiato (2014-08-23 16:15:51)

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#2 2014-08-03 03:07:13

jasonwryan
Anarchist
From: .nz
Registered: 2009-05-09
Posts: 30,424
Website

Re: [SOLVED] Console: backspace, delete, ctrl not working

Please use code tags when pasting to the boards: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fo … s_and_Code


Moving to Kernel & Hardware...


Arch + dwm   •   Mercurial repos  •   Surfraw

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#3 2014-08-16 15:10:23

HotblackDesiato
Member
Registered: 2014-08-03
Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] Console: backspace, delete, ctrl not working

Nobody? Maybe I should file a bug report.

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#4 2014-08-23 16:20:12

HotblackDesiato
Member
Registered: 2014-08-03
Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] Console: backspace, delete, ctrl not working

I just solved my problem by changing vconsole.conf and mkinitcpio.conf as follows:

vconsole.conf

KEYMAP=de-latin1
FONT=Lat2-Terminus16

mkinitcpio.conf (I replaced 'keyboard consolefont' by 'sd-vconsole' in HOOKs="...)

...
HOOKS="base udev autodetect modconf block filesystems btrfs keyboard archlogo sd-vconsole dkms vboxhost vboxguest numlock"
...

I am unsure why this solved my problem. My old vconsole.conf had been working on both computers for many years and it still works on my two other machines.

Last edited by HotblackDesiato (2014-08-23 16:20:38)

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#5 2014-10-07 15:32:47

Commander
Member
Registered: 2011-02-12
Posts: 43

Re: [SOLVED] Console: backspace, delete, ctrl not working

HotblackDesiato wrote:

I just solved my problem by changing vconsole.conf and mkinitcpio.conf as follows:

vconsole.conf

KEYMAP=de-latin1
FONT=Lat2-Terminus16

mkinitcpio.conf (I replaced 'keyboard consolefont' by 'sd-vconsole' in HOOKs="...)

...
HOOKS="base udev autodetect modconf block filesystems btrfs keyboard archlogo sd-vconsole dkms vboxhost vboxguest numlock"
...

I am unsure why this solved my problem. My old vconsole.conf had been working on both computers for many years and it still works on my two other machines.

I had similar issue like you.
Esc, tab, backspace probably some other keys started to give me weird inverted questionmarks that could not be understood by the shell. Vim would print it and i was mostly stuck then.

After reading this, i did take a look at my vconsole.conf and noticed that i had FONT_MAP=someisonumber. Looking through it seems that most wikis removed that while few other still had it. Decided to remove it and rebooted and the issue is gone.

I think this started when I switched to uefi from bios setup. But not exactly sure.

Hope this helps others...

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#6 2016-04-23 23:46:26

firekage
Member
From: Eastern Europe, Poland
Registered: 2013-06-30
Posts: 617

Re: [SOLVED] Console: backspace, delete, ctrl not working

Commander wrote:
HotblackDesiato wrote:

I just solved my problem by changing vconsole.conf and mkinitcpio.conf as follows:

vconsole.conf

KEYMAP=de-latin1
FONT=Lat2-Terminus16

mkinitcpio.conf (I replaced 'keyboard consolefont' by 'sd-vconsole' in HOOKs="...)

...
HOOKS="base udev autodetect modconf block filesystems btrfs keyboard archlogo sd-vconsole dkms vboxhost vboxguest numlock"
...

I am unsure why this solved my problem. My old vconsole.conf had been working on both computers for many years and it still works on my two other machines.

I had similar issue like you.
Esc, tab, backspace probably some other keys started to give me weird inverted questionmarks that could not be understood by the shell. Vim would print it and i was mostly stuck then.

After reading this, i did take a look at my vconsole.conf and noticed that i had FONT_MAP=someisonumber. Looking through it seems that most wikis removed that while few other still had it. Decided to remove it and rebooted and the issue is gone.

I think this started when I switched to uefi from bios setup. But not exactly sure.

Hope this helps others...


Thank you very cuch. I've been fighting with that for few hours...and had to boot in arch-chroot to type!

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#7 2016-04-26 09:59:30

WorMzy
Forum Moderator
From: Scotland
Registered: 2010-06-16
Posts: 11,787
Website

Re: [SOLVED] Console: backspace, delete, ctrl not working

Please don't necrobump, firekage. Especially "solved" threads. After three years and ~500 posts, you should really know better than this.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fo … bumping.22

Closing.


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