2007 November Archive at Two Penguins and a Typewriter

At my school, MICDS, we have a large TV mounted to the wall in one of our common areas. The TV was installed this summer and we have been using it to show photos or video of current school-related events and information. For example, we put the RamReport on the screen following the week of its premier. I have found myself in the lucky position of being in charge of its content.

To be brief: it has been a wonderful experience to walk past and see groups of kids stopped watching a video or pictures scroll by. It has proven to be a novel, ad hoc, way to publicize the achievements of various groups (sports teams, the cast/crew of plays, etc.). Without forcing knowledge of these achievements on students (as ‘announcements’ often do), it allows students to come to appreciate what their peers are doing on the student’s own terms — creating a deeper understanding than “boy’s swimming will travel to state next week…”.

A few weeks ago, our Field Hockey team (of which I am very proud to be the Student Trainer) went to the “Midwest Championships”. So, the following week we placed pictures from the game (taken by student Chris Franklin) on the screen. I have included a sampling of the pictures below. Enjoy.

For the last two weeks I have been perplexed by a very serious problem. When I pressed the up arrow key on my keyboard, a screenshot was taken and a menu popped up to show it to me. If I pressed any of the other arrow keys, nothing happened (thankfully, I guess).

After two weeks of googleing (with no result), I took a look at my keymap/keyboard layout settings. In my xorg.conf file was the following:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
        Driver          "kbd"
        Option          "CoreKeyboard"
        Option          "XkbRules"      "xorg"
        Option          "XkbModel"      "pc104"
        Option          "XkbLayout"     "us"
        Option          "XkbVariant"    "dvorak"
EndSection

OK, so that looks fine. Then I go and take a look at my KDE Control Center and notice that I have the Enable keyboard layouts option checked, using it to also select Dvorak as my layout.

Since I don’t need to switch to Dvorak twice, I turned it off. And, upon restarting X the problem was solved. This leaves me to conclude that there is some bug causing the combination of KDE’s keyboard layout code, and my xorg.conf to mesh in weird ways.

Perhaps not very interesting, but maybe this will fix some googler’s problem.