Curious keyboard behaviour.

        I've been experiencing weird keyboard behaviour since the recent Feisty
upgrade which I assumed was related to the network card badness and
lockups (since they both seemed to occur at the same time). However,
now that I'm running a friendly Edgy kernel, I've still run into these
periodic keyboard snafus -- even though everything else works as advertised.
        What happens is that, while using the keyboard, my metakey status will
get into an inconsistent state. For example, if I'm typing on the
alphanumeric section of the keyboard ctrl, alt, or shift will become
stuck "on" until I press the keys again. If I'm using the arrow keys or
insert/delete/etc, even though I leave numlock ON and use the dedicated
arrow keys, I will have 4/8/6/2 pop into my text as if I were using the
number pad and had temporarily toggled on the numlock.
        I've tried two different PS/2 keyboards, and it seems unlikely that
it's a single dead keyboard. The keyboards otherwise seem to function
entirely normally. A USB keyboard seems unaffected by the behaviour,
though, so I've been using that more often than my main one. I'll
probably try out more keyboards as time permits.
        Whenever this behaviour occurs, I get a friendly dmesg entry:

[17183431.224000] atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code
0x8e on isa0060/serio0).
[17183431.224000] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00e <keycode>' to make it
known.

[17183443.632000] atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code
0xe0 on isa0060/serio0).
[17183443.632000] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e060 <keycode>' to make it
known.

[17183686.936000] atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code
0xff on isa0060/serio0).
[17183686.936000] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e07f <keycode>' to make it
known.

        My X11 config hasn't change the keyboard type... so I'm not sure which
piece of software might be responsible for this bru-ha-ha.

PS: You'll have to forgive my frequent posting. Clearly this was a
lesson it not upgrading to an Ubuntu release until a number of months
after it's been out :)
Received on Wed May 2 02:07:36 2007