Keyboard controls

Created by: Lester Caine, Last modification: 11 hours 26 minutes ago

Management of the keyboard functions has always been hit and miss. I do still remember that even using the keyboard in the first versions of windows were an afterthought. If the mouse stopped working there was no way to save via the keyboard, but things are a lot better today. In Linux I have had similar problems where the keyboard and/or mouse stop working. Something that Claude has just come up with is the following Magic SysRq Key Combinations which I was not aware off.

Alt + SysRq + R (Restore keyboard control)
Alt + SysRq + E (Terminate all processes)
Alt + SysRq + I (Kill all processes)
Alt + SysRq + S (Sync filesystem)
Alt + SysRq + U (Unmount filesystems)
Alt + SysRq + B (Reboot immediately)

I have resorted in the past to Alt+F2 to get things going again, although if there is nothing running that I need to save, a quick power-down and up can be quickest. What I think is a common requirement is a proper power reset from time to time. Gone are the days when one could run a windows XP machine for YEARS without any problem. Windows 7 required a reboot at least monthly to keep it stable and I don't think Windows 10 is any better. Linux servers have been running for as long in the past, but often today one has to reboot after a system update to be sure all files have been updated.

There have been a few problems with the wrong font being used in the console and a few pointers to check things include

echo $LANG
locale
localectl status

The only configuration I am interested in is en_GB.UTF-8 and for some reason when checking this out I found my keyboard was set to "microsoftpro" which was a surprise, but it's now returned to pc105 which is what I am actually using. But what I had failed to spot was that there IS a font selection in the profile settings of Konsole under Appearance just below the colour selection panel. The problem I had been trying to address was that the font being used had problems with capital letters and punctuation, but I've now got a clean 'Droid Sans Mono' selected which is nice when working with the servers via ssh.

On the desktop machine, automatically logging in is an obviously the way to go but crib sheets point to 'Startup and Shutdown' Tumbleweed does not have a section for in system settings ... Have found Login Screen setting under Colours and Themes which then allows access to Behaviour, but now that I am back to a single personal user account there should not be any need to change it again.