Two Penguins and a Typewriter

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.