Hello.
I’m working just fine in photon, with my jed and my terminals… then,
suddenly, for no apparent reason, the “Ins”, “Del”, “Home”, “End”,
“PgUp” and “PgDn” keys stop working properly. This happens very often
and then I have two possibilities: go on working without those keys or
just reboot so that those keys work alright again. My keyboard is
Spanish.
Anyone can guess what’s happening?
Thanks in advance.
Jose.
Just a wild guess here. I sometimes find that my keyboard gets confused
about the state of a Shift, Ctrl, or Alt key. Try pressing each of these
keys (one at a time) and see if the problem goes away. As far as I know,
it’s a hardware problem with the keyboard controller, because I’ve had it
happen on many different systems (or maybe there’s something peculiarly
spasmic about my typing method 
.
–
Bert Menkveld
“Jose A. Galvez” <jagalvez@iai.csic.es> wrote in message
news:3A843F6B.4023FFAB@iai.csic.es…
Hello.
I’m working just fine in photon, with my jed and my terminals… then,
suddenly, for no apparent reason, the “Ins”, “Del”, “Home”, “End”,
“PgUp” and “PgDn” keys stop working properly. This happens very often
and then I have two possibilities: go on working without those keys or
just reboot so that those keys work alright again. My keyboard is
Spanish.Anyone can guess what’s happening?
Thanks in advance.
Jose.
Hi Jose,
I saw this exact same (I think) situation under the Sept Release of QNX6…
I e-mailed QSSL the symptoms, and a step by step procedure that would
reproduce the problems on my machine about 90% of the time.
They e-mailed me back that they could not reproduce the problem.
(My personal solution consisted in never using the “key chord” (,
etc.,) to switch to different photon screens. When I did not do that, then
the problem never appeared)
It took a few days of training, but I have more or less dropped that habit
now!
Jose A. Galvez <jagalvez@iai.csic.es> wrote in message
news:3A843F6B.4023FFAB@iai.csic.es…
Hello.
I’m working just fine in photon, with my jed and my terminals… then,
suddenly, for no apparent reason, the “Ins”, “Del”, “Home”, “End”,
“PgUp” and “PgDn” keys stop working properly. This happens very often
and then I have two possibilities: go on working without those keys or
just reboot so that those keys work alright again. My keyboard is
Spanish.Anyone can guess what’s happening?
Thanks in advance.
Jose.
Previously, Steve Munnings, Corman Technologies wrote in comp.os.qnx:
I saw this exact same (I think) situation under the Sept Release of QNX6…
Steve, it’s a hardware thing. I’ve seen it occur on QNX4, Win95, Win98,
WinNT, and Win2K. The hardware actually sends two events for each
keypress, one for the keypress, one for the release. The problem is
that the keyboard controller glitches and neglects to send the release
for one of those keys. I have no idea why it only appears to affect
those keys (probably because they are modifiers to other keys). It may
be that the normal (non-modifier) keys don’t send two events and only
send one.
I actually like this problem. It’s easy to fix, you just hit all of
those keys and it fixes itself (by sending both events). Of course when
you are asked by a collegue to help with this problem, you appear to be
doing absolutely nothing at all since the users know that those keys
don’t do anything on their own. I even have a small rubber chicken
to wave convincingly over the keyboard to help with the fix.
Cheers,
Camz.
–
Martin Zimmerman camz@passageway.com
Camz Software Enterprises www.passageway.com/camz/qnx/
QNX Programming & Consulting
Hi Martin,
I am not totally convinced that it is a hardware thing (in this case)…
I am well aware of the keyboard mechanism - I have had to struggle mightily
with it under Windows when I wrote the initial version of QWits…
The thing that doesn’t “ring true” in this case, is that only jed has the
key combinations messed up. All other apps (at least for me) continued to
work correctly…
Also, I was not able to fix it by re-pressing all the relevant keys
(IIRC)… My guess is that some keyboard tracking thing in Xphoton got out
of sync somehow (jed uses XPhoton as its interface)
I am not totally convinced that the problem was not started by the hardware,
it is just that, in my case I don’t think that the keyboard “twiddling”
allowed me to recover.
I shall have to go and attempt to recreate the situation now - just so I can
figure out what the problem is/was!! 
AHA - so you are one of those continuing to propagate the “cult of the
hardware high priests” ! 
Martin Zimmerman <camz_AT_passageway_DOT_com@wooga.passageway.com> wrote in
message news:Voyager.010212231146.10371C@wooga.wooga.passageway.com…
Previously, Steve Munnings, Corman Technologies wrote in comp.os.qnx:
I saw this exact same (I think) situation under the Sept Release of
QNX6…Steve, it’s a hardware thing. I’ve seen it occur on QNX4, Win95, Win98,
WinNT, and Win2K. The hardware actually sends two events for each
keypress, one for the keypress, one for the release. The problem is
that the keyboard controller glitches and neglects to send the release
for one of those keys. I have no idea why it only appears to affect
those keys (probably because they are modifiers to other keys). It may
be that the normal (non-modifier) keys don’t send two events and only
send one.I actually like this problem. It’s easy to fix, you just hit all of
those keys and it fixes itself (by sending both events). Of course when
you are asked by a collegue to help with this problem, you appear to be
doing absolutely nothing at all since the users know that those keys
don’t do anything on their own. >
to wave convincingly over the keyboard to help with the fix. >Cheers,
Camz.–
Martin Zimmerman > camz@passageway.com
Camz Software Enterprises > www.passageway.com/camz/qnx/
QNX Programming & Consulting
Previously, Steve Munnings, Corman Technologies wrote in comp.os.qnx:
AHA - so you are one of those continuing to propagate the “cult of the
hardware high priests” ! >
You bet! I need a chant to go along with the rubber chicken waving.
The only thing I can think of is “E Pluribus Unix”, but that’s not very
good.
Cheers,
Camz.
–
Martin Zimmerman camz@passageway.com
Camz Software Enterprises www.passageway.com/camz/qnx/
QNX Programming & Consulting
Previously, Jose A. Galvez wrote in comp.os.qnx:
Hello.
I’m working just fine in photon, with my jed and my terminals… then,
suddenly, for no apparent reason, the “Ins”, “Del”, “Home”, “End”,
“PgUp” and “PgDn” keys stop working properly. This happens very often
and then I have two possibilities: go on working without those keys or
just reboot so that those keys work alright again. My keyboard is
Spanish.Anyone can guess what’s happening?
Well, to add to the observations:
I work with an Xphoton running emacs. When I change consoles in
Photon using C-A-1, C-A-2, etc., the emacs sessions loses its concept
of whether the Ctrl and Alt keys are down. The Xphoton session never
gets told about key releases when I change consoles. I have to pump
the Alt and Ctl keys a couple of times to clear their state when
switching back to emacs. Also, the Ctrl, Alt and the number (1-9)
sometimes get delivered to the Xphoton session during a switch, but
not always. This is definitely a software problem, and is either
generic to Photon, or specific to Xphoton.
Andrew