Keyboard lockup

Monday, November 14th, 2005

The new server seems to have a tendency to freeze. Or at least it did. It was hard to isolate this problem until I got the memory issue resolved. Then I noticed that the system would still occasionally lose the use of the keyboard but otherwise the system would be fine. That is, the mouse would work and other processes were unaffected. Looking at /var/log/messages showed me that there was a kernel oops related to this symptom. While poking around in the BIOS, I saw that there was an option to enable or disable USB keyboard support. I have a PS/2 keyboard and so I switched that off. The problem hasn’t been back since then. But I changed a few other things as well, so I can’t say for sure this was the problem.

I’m feeling geeky enough at this point that I might want to actually see if I can bring the problem back by setting the BIOS back to USB keyboard support.

———–

I set the BIOS back to enable USB keyboard support and could not get the kernel to oops after 3 days. I now believe that the problem was tied to Fedora since the last few days have been in Ubuntu.