keyboard jams when switching windows tasks

Daniel Goertzen goertzen@ertw.com
Tue Mar 1 21:44:00 GMT 2005


Hello, I've suddenly encountered problems with keyboard freeze ups on my 
Cygwin/X (XDMCP) on XP talking to a KDE Konsole on Gentoo Linux x86.  
Incidentally, the same thing started happening at work with Cygwin/X on 
XP talking to Konsole on Gentoo Linux x86_64.  I did install Windows 
Updates just prior to seeing this problem on both machines, but have 
been unable to reproduce this on a cooworker's computer who also uses 
XP, so I can't prove this is the cause.

How to freeze up a Konsole (while connected by XDMCP to a remote kdm):
1. Click on a running Konsole program to give it focus (it won't freeze 
if it doesn't have focus)
2. Switch to another Windows application by clicking it in the 
application bar (alt-tab won't trigger the problem.)
3. Switch back to the X server with the mouse (again, alt-tab won't 
trigger the problem)
4. Voila, Konsole is now insensitive to keyboard input.  It will never 
print anything no matter which keys you press.  The up and down arrows 
scroll the window around instead of cycle through bash history as one 
would expect.

To unfreeze the window, do the exact same thing again.  That's right, 
the frozen state is toggleable.  Using this method, you can get multiple 
Konsoles frozen at the same time and unfreeze them in the order you 
want.  When you unfreeze a console, all the keys you pressed when it was 
frozen come flooding out.

Other interesting points:
- This problem is happening with X/Cygwin versions 60801000 and 60802000.
- I use the startxdmcp.bat script.
- The linux boxen have Gentoo xorg-x11-6.8.0-r4 and Gentoo kde-3.3.2

Thoughts?
Dan.



More information about the Cygwin-xfree mailing list