Alt key stops working

[Scott Robbins]

On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 03:16:03PM -0400, Jon Stanley wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Leon Stringer
> <leon.stringer at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> 
> >  Thanks for your reply, but I'm using Gnome...
> 
> I've seen this in XFCE  on F8, so my guess is that it is not specific
> to the desktop environment.  My recourse is to log out and log back in
> - it seems to only occur after i have used the VMWare server console
> via an X forwarded connection to my rhel4 box.  That does some wacky
> things with X to grab input, so I just kind of dismissed it as "it
> hurts when I do that, doc".  Also, it doesn't happen all the time.

I've had something like that happen frequently with the Windows key--not
distro specific or even O/S specific, I've had it happen in FreeBSD as
well.  I have an .xmodmaprc file and run xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc before X
boots, which solved the Windows key (Mod4) for me. 

You could try making one.  Alt_L is 64 and Alt_R is 113, so 
you could try a ~/.xmodmaprc of 

keycode 64 =Alt_L 
keycode 113 =Alt_R 

Then, when the problem starts occuring try running
xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc 

and see if it fixes the issue. (It probably won't in the open terminal
or other application, but hopefully will take effect for any opened
after that. 


-- 
Scott Robbins
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