Fix: Up arrow launches KSnapshot

Published
by
Anthony Chivetta
on 2007-11-19
in Quick fixes
. Tags: , , , , .

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.

Enable keyboard layouts

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.

4 Responses to “Fix: Up arrow launches KSnapshot”

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address
  1. 1 J
    2007-12-31 at 14:26
    Thank you for this post, it saved what was left of my hair! In my situation I updated to the latest kde and xorg and found my keyboard had gone south just as you described. I turned off keyboard layouts in kde and it works again.
  2. 2 Rob
    2008-01-18 at 13:07
    Ahh… nice to know that someone has the same symptom but alas, the solution isn’t for me :(

    My KDE didn’t have Keyboard Layouts enabled. I tried enabling it and disabling it again, but the keys remain scrambled. Also noticeable: the left key seems to be Alt; Insert, Delete, Home End, and Page Up seem to do nothing; Page Down acts like the context menu key (I just tried it and it acted like I’d right-clicked, it’s supposed to be the key next to Right Ctrl that you never use). The best I can figure is that deactivating the Keyboard Layouts option actually wiped out another conflicting setting (which I never had)… and that when KDE chokes on this conflict (or mine) it punts and uses a similarly broken layout.

    This is in a mostly up-to-date Gentoo, but it’s interesting to note that in my friend’s mostly up-to-date Kubuntu, he has basically NO keyboard once he logs into KDE. The quick fix is to remove your ~/.kde directory (or .kde3.5) and the problem is solved. This worked in that Kubuntu setup, but I haven’t tried it yet in mine… here goes.

  3. 3 Muffit
    2008-01-23 at 17:46
    Thanks man! Such a simple “solution” for something that was bothering me for days. Now I can sleep again…
  4. 4 eB
    2008-07-25 at 06:27
    For me it was solved by changing the keyboard model in KDE to an evdev one. And leave the xorg.conf file untouched.

    more info:
    http://www.nabble.com/xorg—keyboard-td14973779.html

Leave a Reply