First post to Debian-Users; I hope this isn't inappropriate.
In December I upgraded Ubuntu 9.04 to 10.04. The keyboard and mouse
would then freeze after about five minutes of use. At that point I
installed Debian 6 (another machine uses Debian, but this computer had
come with Ubuntu 9.04 installed, so I used that for a year with no
problems). Alas, the same thing happened with Debian 6.
I have a PS/2 mouse and keyboard. I noticed that an added USB mouse
would continue to operate, so replaced the mouse with that. The
keyboard lockup continued, but decreased in frequency to about one a
day. That is still unacceptable, but temporarily manageable.
There are no indications of anything wrong in any of the logs.
The O/S is fully functional; I can log into it from another machine
and restart it that way.
When the lockup occurs, most of the time the keyboard continually
repeats a key, but not always the same key. I've seen the escape key,
the "l", the "k", and others. Pressing the same key (to get the driver
to see the "release" does not stop it). Other times it appears as
though no key is repeating (at least nothing happens when the mouse
is placed in a client).
I've searched google and found quite a few descriptions of what
appears similar behavior, with no solutions.
Any suggestions on what I can do? Replace the PS/2 keyboard with a
USB?
Something I recently noticed is that
$ setxkbmap -print
indicates that X thinks I'm using a pc105 keyboard when in fact I have
a pc104. I changed that, from the command line, with
$ setxkbmap -model pc104
That didn't improve anything (I still get lockups) nor did it change
the keyboard operation, as far as I can tell. However, I'm wondering
why X is using the wrong keyboard model. Maybe I entered the wrong
model during the installation. What sets the default value (there is
no xorg.conf file)?