The crazy repeating keyboard

Ubuntu 8.10 is not an evolutionary step; its more like a smaller baby step forward. The interface is not consistently different and there are things which kinda bug me about it. There is this crazy problem with keyboard repeating which drove me crazy. Any letter seems able to stage some crazed repeating thing on laptops or desktops. One letter becomes three way too quick and the gnome keyboard preferences don’t do anything.

I tried a few different things like running keyboard rate commands, xset, but finally think I licked it by inserting this into /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section “ServerFlags”
Option “AutoAddDevices” “off”
EndSection

Then logging off and back in again. When you do this, some or maybe most of the special keyboard commands won’t work; but the magic is that the gnome keyboard preference will work. Now you can set them to what you want and you can tell the difference. Now, simply comment out the above three things after making changes that work for you and logout and back in again. For me, this fixes the crazy keyboard things.

This seems to have been around through a few iterations of Ubuntu and I have never noticed it in my Debian Lenny desktop at work.

Other than that, there are a few things I have started using more and more. These were around before but I have gained an appreciation of them. One is SSHfs. This is a great way to mount, use, and securely manage a remote file system. The second is TrueCrypt. Install it and manage those files you want secure.

That’s my ongoing report for Ubuntu Ibex. I like it; but its not some big step forward as I thought it would be. Its more like a nicer environment bounded by somewhat growing amounts of splurg and sloth. Gnome is getting very heavy duty these days I think. Luckily most of my systems, laptops included, seem to do fine. As a last word, suspend and hibernation just work now.

Thanks !