Some keyboard questions: Re: Need a memory refresh

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Tim again.

The first thing I'd check is what shell is specified for each user:

 $ for u in john demo test ; do awk -F: '$1=="'"$u"'"{print $1,
 $NF}' /etc/passwd; done

This should print out the shell for each of those three users (john,
demo, test).

If one of them is different, you should be able to use "chsh" as the
aberrant user to change to your preferred shell as found
in /etc/shells

My next stop would be to check the shell RC files such as your
~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile for each of the users.  I
don't have a good one-liner for diagnosing this, but if you auto-start
tmux/screen in some and don't auto-start it in others, that might be
an issue.  It's hard to tell from your description, but it might just
be a matter of the $PS1 prompt string displaying something
unexpected, so you might also check what that's set to for each
account.

If the keyboard becomes unresponsive, have you perhaps hit control+S
which can be a flow-control character (XON/XOFF)?  If so, try typing
control+Q to resume flow.  This might also be a matter of your "stty"
setting for flow-control differing between the accounts.  Look for
lines in your shell startup files containing "stty" and see if any
refer to "ixon" or "ixoff" or use the following in each shell to see
what the flow-control is set to:

  $ stty -a | grep -o -e '-*ixo[^ ]*'

That should produce two lines, one for "ixon" and one for "ixoff",
each optionally preceded by a minus-sign to show whether the setting
is on or off.  I think that if they're on (no minus sign), the
terminal treats control+S and control+Q as flow control characters;
if you turn them off (`stty -ixon -ixoff` which you could put in
your startup file) then the terminal should ignore them as
flow-control characters preventing future problems.

Here's hoping one of those points you in the right direction.

-tim


On July  5, 2019, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> John Boyer here.
> 
> Thanks for all the memory refreshing. I've decided to use different
> consoles for different users via ctrl+alt+Fn, so i can run screen
> in each user. For one of the additional users screen behaves
> normally, but for the other it shows /bin/bash . Incidentally, I am
> using BRLTTY. it works fine. 
> 
> Sometimes the keyboard becomes totally unresponsive, but BRLTTY
> still responds to keys on the Braille display. I've just been doing
> a cold reboot. Suggestions appreciated.