Alt key not responding....

Hi,

The Alt key to the right of my space-bar has NEVER worked.... I am wondering if this is a physical hardware defect with my machine, or if there is a software glitch....?

Anyone else having this problem? I'm on the Linpus version, no hard drive.

Thanks!

~R

 

Yes, it is most likely a hardware defect. To be sure you can open a terminal (you can open a terminal from the File menu of the file manager) and type in "xev", this program will report all keyboard and mouse events the X server receives, if you get no output from this program when pressing the Alt key, then the key doesn't work.

 

Here's an odd problem I have too. I've got the multilingual keyboard. I had to remap the right alt key to work as a normal alt using xmodmap. After some updates and maybe the firmware update, the mods I've made don't work anymore. The key physically works and I've checked it using xev.

Could this be related to the non functioning right alt of the other user?

 

Yes it is due to the keyboard map that Acer uses. I've installed the KDE base package and used Kcontrol to change it to map as an Acer laptop US mapping and now both alts function the same. There's probably a simpler way to change KB maps, but I wanted a lot of the KDE packages anyway.

 

Thanks for the thoughts!

It sounds like it is a mapping issue, and not a failure of the hardware - I live and work in Asia, so the keyboard is shared by several characters of several languages - probably related to that...?

I'll try the terminal command and see if it works...

~R.

 

After installing Ubuntu and selecting the US keyboard with euro sign on 5, I had the same problem. The solution for me (under the gnome control panels, so YMMV) was to go to system > preferences > keyboard > layout > layout options > third level choosers, and select Right Alt never chooses 3rd level.

If you're curious about what this "third level is," that's what the OS is calling the alternative graphic (get it? Alt gr?) level. On an international keyboard, it enables typing of the special characters that appear on the lower right corner of the key. Depending on the locality the keyboard was intended for, you can have many more language-specific characters that don't appear on the standard 104-key US QWERTY keyboard.