Subject: Re: Problem about Sparky
From: Fowler, Andrew
Date: Apr 23, 2014

Previous: 913

Just a few days ago I started having a similar problem, where Sparky wont accept any input from the keyboard. Things got stranger when I found out that one users account still works while mine and another on the same Linux box dont. Also, everything was normal if I ran Sparky remotely. Toms pointer to a much older post about the SCIM utility pointed me in the right direction, so Im posting my fix in case it helps someone else.

The basic explanation is the same as the old post: certain input methods which can usually be linked to foreign language support seem to stop the keyboard from working in some applications, including Sparky. Its gotten a bit messier, though. SCIM has been replaced by IBus, which in turn is now part of Gnome and cant really be turned off.

If youre using a different window manager in Linux (KDE, etc.) and have similar problems, my Google searches turned up the same sorts of issues, so hopefully this will give you somewhere to start.

Here is the solution, which worked for me (Fedora 19 with the default Gnome session). It should work for anyone running any distribution that uses Gnome 3.

1. get Gnome to ignore the keyboard settings so you can actually use the input method selector to disable everything. Type or copy/paste the following (set back to true if you want to restore the default):

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.keyboard active false

2. Run the input method selector and select no input method. Either search for input method from the activities menu or run it by typing im-chooser. It should tell you that you need to log out; if the log out icon doesnt become active, choose one of the other input methods, then re-select no input method.

Cheers,

Andrew

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