I am typing this message and swearing alongside, because every 20th character or so just doesn't show up in vim, which I use through mutt within an aterm running through WindowMaker on XF86 4.2.1-3 on a Debian testing system on my Latitude C610 (with a PII 1.2 GHz and 1024Mb of RAM), displaying through a ATI Radeon Mobility LY, which is driven by X's native ati module. When I say every 20th character, then this means any random character. The problem is not with a set of keys, it's with the entire keyboard, including the space and return keys. I've exchanged the keyboard only to find the same problems, so I am leaning towards a software problem. It happens on the ttys too though. My X is weird anyway. Every now and then, the mouse pointer will freeze for a second or two before continuing to move, as if the system was too busy to update it. Similar things happen to letters I type, sometimes the system will just stop blinking or advancing the cursor for two seconds, until after that time, everything I typed suddenly appears. This really makes editing a lot of fun (and this last thing also happens on the console). Now, 1.2 GHz and 1Gb RAM should be enough. Processor load is below 0.10 and everything else on this system is happy (safe the temperature sensor). I want to solve this problem! Is it theoretically posssible that the system gets into a weird state every so often to forget the contents of its keyboard buffer? Or could this be a motherboard problem too? The weirdities started around the time that Dell replaced my motherboard because of the temperature sensor (which didn't fix that problem anyway). It's weird, because whenever I want to reciprocate the problem (like right this second), everything works. As soon as I don't think about it anymore, it comes back. Murphy in action. Where do I start to solve this? Any help appreciated! -- .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org> : :' : proud Debian developer, admin, and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system NOTE: The public PGP keyservers are broken! Get my key here: http://people.debian.org/~madduck/gpg/330c4a75.asc
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