Ubuntu Ibex key repeat problems

This is really irritating me, but I can’t find a solution so far. I use Synergy to control multiple computers from a single keyboard, but have found that Ubuntu Ibex does not completely work. Apart from the “@” symbol being translated to a capital omega (which I did find a fix for) there is still the problem that the “left arrow” and “down arrow” keys (the ones in the group between the alphabetic and numeric keypads) do not seem to repeat when held down. All the other keys (with the possible exception of “End”) seem to repeat normally.

Anyone know of a fix or work-around?

Evan Bottcher » Blog Archive » Linux at work again!

I’ve been intending to install Ubuntu Hardy Heron in a virtual machine for a while now, but have been scared off a bit by reports of incompatibilities with the cleverer bits of virtual/real interaction. It’s a shame, because I am thoroughly enjoying using a bare-metal installation, and would like the flexibility and portability of using it on other machines, too.

This blog post seems to indicate that there is a success path through this, though. I’ll give it a go when I get a chance.

Evan Bottcher » Blog Archive » Linux at work again!

Update: looks like I wasn’t really paying attention. This article is describing the other way round - running Windows on Ubuntu. SIgh.

Disable that damn PC speaker under Linux

I have finally got fed up enough with the irritating beeping coming from my Ubuntu box that I looked up how to disable the speaker. It turns out there are a variety of approaches:

To just disable beeping in bash (and most other shells) add the following line to /etc/inputrc

set bell-style none

To disable beeping in the MySQL console add the following line to ~/my.cnf

no-beep

Or, to turn off all Linux-generated beeping you can remove the offending “pcspkr” module completely using

/sbin/modprobe -r pcspkr

If you want this to happen on every restart, add it to the appropriate startup script (in Ubuntu Heron this seems to be /etc/rc.local)

Keyboard @ Symbol Synergy Woes

I have just added an extra PC to my Synergy setup, and found that it was confusing some keyboard characters. Particularly it was translating an entered @ to a capital Omega. After a bit of digging, I found the following discussion:

Keyboard @ Symbol Woes - Ubuntu Forums

The eventual recommendation is the following fix. I tried it on both an Ubuntu Heron system and an older Fedora 5 box, bot are working much better now.
xmodmap -e "keycode 53 = x X greater greater greater greater"
xmodmap -e "keycode 52 = z Z less less less less"
xmodmap -e "keycode 24 = q Q at at at at"

Installing Linux on an elderly laptop

A nice article which goes throught the distro-selection process for running Linux on an “elderly” laptop. The final choice is interesting, but I’m not sure if it would still apply to my somewhat more “elderly” laptop. The one in the article has a 900MHz CPU and 384MB RAM, whereas mine is a mere 233MHz with some small amount of RAM. I might give it a go, though…

Installing Linux on an elderly laptop - Bods’s Blog | Planet Bods