meta keys randomly stop working

shepmaster · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 105

Hey all, recently I have had a strange problem... Every so often, my meta keys will stop working. This seems to affect:

Caps Lock
Shift
Control
Meta / Windows key

However, Alt does not seem to be affected. This applies to left and right versions of the keys (where appropriate). The only 'fix' I have found is to exit out of X and start X again.

I am usually running amarok, vmware, firefox, thunderbird, and a handful of *terms. What is extra strange is that these keys continue work in Windows under vmware! Closing out of all these programs to an empty fluxbox desktop does not fix the problem.

Running xev seems to show that they are still being recognized as the same keys, they just have no affect.

Any suggestions or places to look would be highly appreciated!

shepmaster · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 105

i still have this happen every so often when i use vmware. any ideas, o mighty forum readers

aronparsons · Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2008 8:50 pm Post subject:

I've had the exact same thing happen many times when running VMware Server. The only solution I've found is to restart the X session.

Having said that, I've moved on to VirtualBox for home use and don't have that issue anymore.

nosfucious · Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 7:59 am Post subject:

I have had this to on AMD64, with VMWARE server 1.0.8 something somthing.

A bit more web searching has found this link https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/195982.

The workaround appears to be to run

justinkb · Apprentice Joined: 23 Dec 2008 Posts: 161

from the problem description it was painfully obvious the problem is vmware hijacking those keys...

imho.