Keyboard not working

Yesterday, after starting my openSUSE 11.1, I logged into my normal user account in KDE 4.1 session. I was surprised to find that my laptop keyboard was not working. I could use the touchpad but I could not get the keyboard to work. On top of it, I was also having an online exam to take.

I logged out and retried but it did not work. Then I restarted and retried yet again in vain. I thought I should check on my keyboard as well. So I logged into an Enlightenment session and I found that my keyboard was OK. I went on with my exam.

After finishing it, I logged out logged back as root into a KDE 4.1 session and found the keyboard to be working. I figures this was because settings for that user had changed for some reason. I was quite surprised because I had not done any installs. I hadn't even deleted a file.

I connected my USB keyboard (which I had got to play games though I haven't played in about a year now) to see if it works. It didn't either. I logged back into Enlightenment, and launched Konversation and joined #opensuse-kde and #suse on Freenode. I stated my problem. After discussing for some time, though I didn't find any solution, I realized that it was a very rare situation. Then I made a post at opensuse forums and went to sleep.

Today morning, I found replies on it. One was about kwin. I knew about it from last night's discussion at IRC. Issuing the command


kwin --replace

should do it for me; at least that's what I know now. However, for that to work I need to get my keyboard working. The other reply asked me to login on command line, run sax2, select my keyboard and then run kdm and start a KDE session.

I tried this one. It worked for me. I thought I should blog about it and started writing this blog. While I was halfway through all of a sudden, i was typing but no letters appeared. Thats when I realized that the keyboard wasn't working with KDE yet again. So I saved the blog and logged out of KDE. I have completed the blog in Enlightenment but my problem stays.