Keyboard non-functional after upgrade to 08.04

Bug #223555 reported by David Chart
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
xorg (Ubuntu)
New
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

After upgrading to 08.04, the keyboard does not work under GNOME. I have a Aluminium iMac, so the keyboard layout is Macintosh. Most keys do nothing; 7-8-9-0 and the keys vertically beneath them function as a numeric keypad.

Obviously, this makes the machine unusable, and it *is* a production machine.

The keyboard works fine on the gdm login screen, and in the failsafe terminal. It does not work in failsafe GNOME, and attempts to change the keyboard layout and get something that would allow me to type letters have failed. The keyboard *does* work as expected in a live session booted from the 08.04 release CD. I upgraded from 07.10 using the Update Manager; no configuration clashes were reported for the keyboard. (I had to modify the alsa-base file to get sound working, so that clashed.)

X server reports an error trying to load the keyboard layout. It asks me to include the following information:

Output of xprop -root | grep XKB:
_XKB_RULES_NAMES(STRING) = "xorg", "pc105", "us", "mac", "lv3:ralt_switch"

Output of gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd/:
layouts = []
model = macintosh
overrideSettings = false
options = []

Revision history for this message
David Chart (ubuntu-davidchart) wrote :

OK, I've fixed this by moving .gconf/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard up to my home directory. Everything now works just fine, and, of course, I still have all the configuration files if people need them to fix the bug. I can also help by testing things.

This is still a bug, of course. "Upgrading Ubuntu made my computer unusable" is not the user experience you want.

Revision history for this message
Michaël (mpalomas) wrote :

i'm glad to find this bug entry because i am facing exactly the same bug with Ubuntu 8.04 64 bits ...
I don't own an Apple Computer, however i own the new Apple keyboard on a PC. I can login in GDM, but as soon as Gnome is loaded, nothing, or almost nothing, work on my keyboard, using the French alternative layout chosen at this installation stage ...
The live CD worked fine though, when i started the installation with the French alternative layout, the keyboard was working as expected.
I'll give a try to the above workaround, but i'm pretty sure there are a LOT of people facing this issue ...

Revision history for this message
Michaël (mpalomas) wrote :

Ok, more info about my issue :

The above workaround seemed to work for me, but actually does not .

1. I moved the keyboard folder to my home directory.
2. i logged out and logged in, opened the gnome terminal : great my keyboard was working again !
3. i tried to configure my network, i opened the network setting stuff, clicked on "unlock", and entered my password
4. i tried to add a new DNS and ... WTF ? My keyboard just broke again ! It seems something happened when i unlock this panel ...

I reproduced this steps several times, to be sure, and the keyboard layout is broken each time after unlocking this panel.
Then i tried to be smarter, as root, i removed the writing rights on the .gconf/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard folder (for all user including root), then i replayed the steps again, and damn, the keyboard still breaks after pressing the unlock button :-/
I didn't try to unlock other configuration dialogs, because honestly, i was a bit furious, and now i am writing this using Windows XP.

Revision history for this message
xuset (jemoher) wrote :

I also tried this workaround. It worked for a while, but after some minutes, not even opening any configuration dialog, it stopped working :-(

Just in case it helps, any other keyboard works perfectly with no change at all in the configuration, etc.

Revision history for this message
David Chart (ubuntu-davidchart) wrote :

Just to note that the workaround has continued to work for me.

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