On Saturday 11 October 2008 21:02:30 Rony wrote:

...

I had faced a similar problem when using Kubuntu 6.06 on the laptop. After login, the keyboard would be useless. I could not pin point the problem but I deleted the .kde folder in the home directory and everything was restored to default settings. All customization of KDE was lost. However I got my keyboard back.

I had thought of that, but didn't actually do it. I need to figure exactly which setting caused this.

Since all configurations in GNU/Linux are stored in plain text files, usually it is easy to figure out the root cause of such problems. Just move ~/.kde to ~/kde-old and re-login to the system in KDE. Then do

diff -r ~/.kde ~/kde-old | less

If there are missing files in ~/.kde or its sub-folders, then get them from ~/kde-old and check keyboard by re-login. Once that test is over and problem is not noticed, then merge change-sets from files in ~/kde-old to ~/.kde and repeat the testing. By analyzing the change sets in each file and then merging such sections from older file-set to the working one, we can figure out when keyboard settings break. If the deviations in files are more (heavily customized KDE apps), usually it will take longer to figure out the cause of the problem.

Raghu