Subject: Re: Sparky Keyboard Input
From: afowler13
Date: Jul 3, 2014

Previous: 918

We ran into this on a different Linux box with different software (NMRViewJ, FWIW), same problem.

I dont do too much with Ubuntu. If it is the same issue, youll have to Google around about how to deal with it there. The fix I posted (in digest #437) for Fedora19 may work anyway if youre using Gnome as your window manager.

If you want to confirm that the problem is indeed caused by ibus before heading down the Google path (this did take me a good couple of hours to sort out), I can think of two things to try:

1. When I was having the problem with Sparky, the local keyboard wasnt working, but things behaved normally if I ran Sparky remotely from another computer.

2. With the other computer having the problem with NVJ, we didnt apply the fix in my prior message. Instead, we killed ibus and the keyboard immediately began responding again. I expect that if and when the computer is rebooted, the problem will appear. However, as root:

2a. type ps -ef | grep ibus. My output at the moment is:

gdm 8713 1 0 Jun26 ? 00:00:04 /usr/bin/ibus-daemon --replace --xim --panel disable
gdm 8715 8713 0 Jun26 ? 00:00:00 /usr/libexec/ibus-dconf
gdm 8719 1 0 Jun26 ? 00:00:00 /usr/libexec/ibus-x11 --kill-daemon
gdm 8740 8713 0 Jun26 ? 00:00:00 /usr/libexec/ibus-engine-simple
root 31548 31437 0 08:37 pts/0 00:00:00 grep --color=auto ibus


2b. kill the ibus daemon and any other ibus processes for good measure. Using the above example, I would type: kill -9 8740 8719 8715 8713, although killing just 8713 (the ibus parent process) may be sufficient.

Hope this helps,
Andrew